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So, while at work you wrote some scripts. And after a code review your boss tells you that he would like to see some variable names changed, to help make the code more readable. So at the beginning of your code you have:

#set script variables
use vars qw/ %opts /;
my $append="\@pdx\.edu";

getopts( 'hrl:m:',\%opts );

#make sure the arguments are provided, fail if #not
usage() if ( $opts{h} || (!$opts{m} || !$opts{l}));

#everything's good, program can start now
my $ldap= signin('true') || die;

#rename variables from opts to something more #"readable"
my $username= $opts{l};
my $mail_alias= $opts{m};
my $remove_flag= $opts{r};

But below this code section, $opts is being called quite a few times, and the script is another 100 hundred lines of code or so. So what do you do?

1)Tell your boss how adding these variables will reduce efficiency and the overall speed of the code and revert the variables name.
2)Do the changes manually
3)open up vim or use sed with the expression s/$opts{}/$/g
4)I don't care... but I do wanna see what you think
5)Other (Please leave a comment. How else will the rest of us learn?)

Answer:

Ok, this isn't the “only” answer, but it is what I did. Opened up VIM, and used the following commands:

:32,$ s/$opts{l}/$username/g
:32,$ s/$opts{r}/$remove_flag/g
:32,$ s/$opts{m}/$mail_alias/g

For those of you not familiar with this let me explain. The explore the first part “:31,$”. The “:” is just a way to signify to vim that your going to preform a command. And the “31,$” is saying between lines 31 and the end of the file (which is what $ means). And then the second part s/$opts{l}/$username/g the command itself. It says that your going to substitute an instance of $opts{l} for $username. The ending g means to it more than once.

So when you put the whole command together you get, between line 31 and the end of the file, replace all instances of $opts{l} with $username.

Hopefully this will help someone else as much as it helped me.