Im working in a perl one liner to invert the contents of my file contents or perform operations, I was able to generate the script and one liner, but this one liner only works by entering file by file. perl -i -ne '$a=reverse $_;print "$a\n"' <filename> I want to change my one liner to get input from a range of files but when i do: perl -i -ne '$a=reverse $_;print "$a\n"' | ls -al I just get screen output of ls -al Not sure how to proceed. Thanks