best method to replace data in a text file?

gsbarry · 04-13-2003, 09:27 AM

Dear all,

I think most people may face a problem to write scripts to replace data in the some config files.

For example, I have a file "profile.txt". It contains:

name="John"
phone="123456"

If I want to change the name to "Peter". Now, I only know to use sed.

But I found that sed can't feed the output back to the original file.
And I hope to do the things like searching the name tag and replacing its value.

Which tools can fulfill my hope? or sed can already do this job?

david_ross · 04-13-2003, 09:45 AM

Try awk.

Or there is a simpler program called "replace" that comes with mysql that may do the trick.

Wynd · 04-13-2003, 12:01 PM

Couldn't you just do something like

sed s/John/Peter/ profile.txt > profile.txt

?

unSpawn · 04-13-2003, 12:15 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Wynd
Couldn't you just do something like

sed s/John/Peter/ profile.txt > profile.txt

?

Did you try doing that yourself? Did it work?

gsbarry · 04-15-2003, 12:00 AM

the replacement function in sed can't fulfill my purpose since the data inside "name=" may be anything.

Did awk can do my job?
could you post a sample for me? since awk is quite complicated to understand. Thanks.

arnold · 04-15-2003, 08:21 AM

google
awk tutorial

I prefer ex with a here script or a command file. Simple and powerful