How can I do an in-place update of a file with perltidy?

Question

If I want to an in-place update of a file with perltidy, how can I do it? Let's say I want to run perl-tidy on foo.pl but I want to the changes to be in foo.pl

Answer 1

You would use the options -b and -bext='/'

perltidy -b -bext='/' foo.pl

Taken from the man page

Make sure you don't have -st provided or the -b and -bext options do nothing; this was actually my problem.

Answer 2

It looks like perltidy has a native solution. Not all programs do. The sponge utility can be used to achieve in-place editing for programs that don't natively support it.

prog file | sponge file