To be honest, i dislike perl: IMHO it is like a Swiss Army pocket knife: 756 functions - and not one of them in a usable shape.*)

My suggestion is to do it with simple shell commands. UNIX is built with a large toolbox of specialised programs, which - unlike perl - serve only one purpose, but serve this purpose excellently. Use some glue (read: shell scripts) and you can build anything you will ever need and then some.

After this long intro, here is how to do it in shell:

Let us first tackle the removal of a line in a given file. We use "sed" for this and it is really simple:

Code:

sed '/<regexp>/d' /path/to/file > /path/to/output

will remove every line in "/path/to/file", which fits the regexp and output the result to "/path/to/output". Fill in the appropriate regexp (in your case a fixed line) and you are done.

Code:

sed '/<string>com\.apple\.PhotoBooth<\/string>/d' /path/to/file > /path/to/output

Some characters with a special meaning to "sed" got a backslash to let the utility know they are not meant in their special meaning but literal. The rest is straightforward. Test this on a single file and proceed once the results are to your liking.

The next step is to do this for all files recursively. There is a special command for this, which is "find" (i suggest reading its man page, it is by far the most effective "file manager" there is. If you ever have tried to do something with Nautilus, Finder, Norton Commander, etc. - "find" outperforms and outpaces these by some orders of magnitude.)

Let us list all the files you want to change with find:

Code:

find /path/to/some/dir -name "*plist" -print

Again, test and eventually tune it to your needs, proceed once you are satisfied with the results.

Last step: combine the two solutions: we use a simple loop for this:

Code:

find /path/to/dir -name "*plist" -print |\
while read FILE ; do
     sed '/<string>com\.apple\.PhotoBooth<\/string>/d' "$FILE" > "$FILE.tmp"
     mv "$FILE.tmp" "$FILE"
done

Voilà!

OK, there are two details you certainly have detected:

Why did i not use the "-i" flag your "sed" might have (like your perl, which also has it) but used a temp file instead and why did i not use the "-exec" clause, which would have spared me the loop, like this:

Code:

find /path/to/dir -name "*plist" -exec  sed -i '/<string>com\.apple\.PhotoBooth<\/string>/d' {} \;

Answer: the "-i"-flag is problematic, as i have explained here and i try to avoid it. Second, i could have written the two lines necessary to change a single file as a script and called it via "find"s "-exec"-clause, but i saw little gain in this, so i put everything into one script.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
_______
*) try using the screwdriver to actually repair something and you will know what i mean.