I need to change some text in a file that's spread across multiple lines. This means perl -pE won't work because it treats each line as a separate regexp. Reading the file in to one big string and then running a multiline regexp is the best solution.

Using -0777 tells Perl to read the entire file in to one string and allows multi-line regexps to work as intended.

If you have an input file with the content like:

if (foo
    && bar && !true) {
    # Do stuff
}

You can change the if statement with a one-liner like this:

perl -0777 -pE 's/\(foo.*?\)/(test)/s' /tmp/input.txt