Best search & replace program

geokker · 09-28-2005, 02:51 PM

I have 1,000 text files spread over 200 folders at various depths. I want to replace "This long, complex string" with "this different, long and complex string" in every file.

So, I want to say to my command line program:

"Go look in this folder and replace every instance of X with Y."

What script/program on the command line can do this?

I'm familiar with search and replace in vi and search with grep. I imagine grep can pipe to vi for this maybe?

aysiu · 09-28-2005, 03:05 PM

Doing this Google search, I found this script. Does that help?

dmellem · 09-28-2005, 03:39 PM

Using sed within a shell script could work, too. You have to look out for whitespace and newlines, though.

-Dan

bigfez · 09-28-2005, 03:41 PM

I don't know about the piping grep to vi option, you would probably want vi to run some sort of batch process or something that I don't really know anything about.

it really wouldnt take much to write a perl script to do this. I know that if i was faced with this problem that is the approach I would take.

this article has most of what you need:

http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/perl/sysadmin/ch02_03.htm