I have a site running adsense and I have about 50 folders with subfolders in them and html files in each folder totaling about 200 folders. What I am looking to do is change some text in each file, some files may not have it but I would say 98% do. What I need to do is change word a to word b in all the files without having to go through each file individually.

Sorry if this has been asked before, I did do a search on google and here and was unable to find anything that really fit the bill.

Much thanks in advance,

Vivo

Definitely a shell script can do this. Is Word "A" pretty much fixed or have similar names in all the sub-folders??

Let find locate all HTML files and perl do the substitution:

Use the /g modifier if the word a could occur more than once on a line. Use \ba\b to allow only whole word matches.

It is actually an adsense site so I need to change 1234 to 5678 in all the pages, so it is the same number through the entire site.

so it would be 'find /home/vivo2341 -name \*.html | xargs perl -wi- -pe 's/a/1234/5678/g'

Like that? I just don't want to screw up everything and ruin something, I will do a backup and then try this tonight! Thank you both for your help.

Close. With the italic a I was referring to your original question, asking to replace word "a". So substitute "1234" for the [i]a[/a]; the command line should be
You could also specify the four options separately to make clearer what's going on -- "perl -w -i~ -p -e 's/1234/5678/g'" (the single quotes are unnecessary here, but a good practice in general).

The perl option -i~ (that's i tilde) does the processing in place, and writes a backup to a file with a tilde appended. E.g., if a file foo.html is changed, you'll find the original version in foo.html~. I chose "~" to be compatible with emacs. That said, making a backup of the whole site is probably a good idea; it may be quicker to revert if something does go wrong.

To check beforehand what command line(s) will be executed, you could change "perl" to "echo perl" -- that way you'll see the (long!) command line(s) without running them.

To check afterward if it worked right, "diff foo.html{~,}" (replacing a real file name for "foo".

Be aware that, e.g., 2.5123489 will be changed to 2.5567889. If that's not desirable, tell us a bit more about which occurrences of "1234" you want to replace. Most constraints can be written as a regular expression (which we use in the s command).

Now there's more than you ever wanted to know