A look at perlrun would probably enrich your day, but meanwhile (and I wonder how many people will have posted this while I type this sentence...) I believe (unless I'm missing something) that the effect you're looking for can be achieved with this:

perl -pe 'tr/}//d' memgrp.dat >> new_mem_grp.dat
[download]

or for extra jollies, just alter the original file in place (saving a backup, of course):

perl -pe 'tr/}//d' -i.bak memgrp.dat
[download]

So in short, the answer to your question is "yes". :-)

tr -d "}" "" <memgrp.dat >>new_mem_grp.dat
[download]

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Well, assuming the asker wants an answer written in Perl (this isn't unixmonks.org or shellscriptmonks.org) I'll give it a shot. The given code and the description don't seem to match. A one liner for the ACTUAL CODE GIVEN (i.e. will remove every occurance of } in the file):

perl -i.old -pe 's/}//g;' memgrp.dat

This code has been lightly tested and "it works for me."

thanks guys.. answered my question beautifully.. i'm still trying to learn more about this slick kind of perl scripting

right... that's the only place it was so i just slopped it.. but yeah it should be $line =~ s/}$//; right?