Re: update-copyright ‘--help’ and ‘--version’

[Karl Berry]

    was defeated by Perl's œôòø-iœôòù support (which, IIUC, says to take all
    script args as filenames, hence leaving no room for the script to
    check/handle args specially

Untried, but what comes to mind first is to check if ($ARGV eq "--help").

Or, omit the -i,
check for --help/--version, 
and (if not present) then set $^I=1 before doing the rest.

Or, avoid -i and code the file replacement by hand (see perlrun).

On the other hand, I wouldn't argue that --help/--version support is so
important for this script that it is worth any complication (let alone a
wrapper).  --best, karl.