Hi,

Lets say that I have a directory with say 10 files.

Question
--------
I would like to find the word "Austria" in all these files and replace it with "Germany".

Note that I do not have perl in my cygwin distribution and so perl based commands do not work.

What is the command that will help me achieve the desired goal.

Thank you
Ingrid

find . -name "*matching pattern*" -exec sed -i "s/Austria/Germany/g" '{}' \;

First----cygwin is not really a Linux distro---it simply allows you to do some "Linux things" within Windows.

I'm assuming that you are using the BASH shell within Cygwin, and that the standard tools--eg SED-- are available.

If you want to operate on all files in the current directory, then this should work:
this edits the files "in place"---ie the old version is not saved. To save to new names, it's a bit more involved.

Thanks for the replies. But this does not solve the underlying problem that I am trying to address.

I have a file. Lets Call it File1.

Step 1
======>
File1a = File generated by executing the following command : sed -i 's/obj/ /g' File1.txt

File1b = File generated by doing a "replace all" for the keyword 'obj' on File 1.

Note that in essence this step involves removing the string "obj" everywhere in File1 i.e. replacing "obj" with nothing.

Step 2
======>
File 2a = Resultant file obtained by doing a "grep -a Title File1a.txt"

File 2b = Resultant file obtained by doing a "grep -a Title File1b.txt"

The strange observation is that File 2a ~= File2b (~= does not equal)

I can make this description meaningful by uploading the actual files on to this site. However there is no space for any attachments and so I was wondering if I could send it to one of the repliers by email so that they can take a look at it.

Clarification:
I want to understand the reason as to why File2a ~= File2b. I need the result as described in File2b but the drawback of that is that I have to manually open the file and do the replace all. Find a command that enabled to have the File2b format is the best solution.

I welcome any new comments/clarifications.

Ingrid

P.S:The find and replace was done using wordpad
Also I see that it is possible to upload files to this site but the file sizes allowed are too small for the files that I want to upload. I have a zip file (332 Kb) containing the following 5 files:
Contents:
File1.txt
File1a.txt
File1b.txt
File2a.txt
File2b.txt
that I can send to any one interested by email.

This
should replace the string 'obj' with a single space.

1. is that what you wanted ie space != "nothing" eg
replace with nothing ie delete string; no replacement

2. exactly how did you do the 'replace all' cmd?

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