perl -i.bak -ne 'print if $. > 1'
[download]

perl -i.bak -ne 'print $prev if $. > 2; $prev=$_' test1
[download]

Removing first and last line of a file:

use strict;
open FILE, "</path/to/inputfile" or die "Blerch: $!\n";
# Set $/ to whatever your line terminating char is in inputfile
my @lines=<FILE>;
shift @lines;
pop @lines;
# @lines now contains the file contents without the first and last lin
+es.
[download]

Removing leading # from a line:

$line=~s/^#//;
[download]

Inserting a leading # in a line:

$line=~s/^(.)/#$1/;
[download]

CU
Robartes-

If I may suggest, a regex is not the best tool for the job here. Unless there is an overriding reason, it might be easier just to do something along the lines of:

my $filename = "blah.txt"; #replace as needed
rename($filename, $filename . '.bak') 
    or die("Unable to rename $filename to $filename.bak: $!\n");
open(INFILE, $filename . '.bak') 
    or die("Can't open $filename.bak for input: $!\n");
open(OUTFILE, '>' . $filename) 
    or die("Can't open $filename for output: $!\n");
  my $linecount = 0;
  while ($line = <INFILE>) { 
    print(OUTFILE $line) if ($linecount);
    $linecount++;
  }
close(INFILE);
close(OUTFILE);
[download]

Two references that cover this and more that I use frequently are the perl FAQs and Perl Cookbook, and there are others here and about.

Hope that helps. I look forward to seeing the responses of others as well.

yes it worked

perl -p0777we 's/ .+? ( ^ .* ^ ) .* /$1/xms'
[download]

perl -i.bak -ne 'print if 2..eof' myfile
[download]

-- Mike

--
just,my${.02}

Dennis