Bash

clpl1980 · 01-22-2007, 04:39 AM

Hi eveybody,

is it possible, inside a bash script to do the following?

. find all (HTML) files in a folder that contain a given keyword
. replace that keyword with a text contained inside a given text files (saved on a local path)

how?

Thank you all!

unSpawn · 01-22-2007, 06:38 AM

is it possible, inside a bash script to do the following?
Sure, but easier (tool for the purpose, efficient, generic) would be to use rpl since it fully replaces your script and is faster.

how?
Since you didn't explicitly ask us to write the script for you: you'll need a "while loop", find, cat, sed and mv. Use cat' to get the change text into a variable, 'find' to find the filenames by extension, pipe the output so it can be used in the "while loop" (and maybe do some tests like the file exists and is not a symlink, access permissions), ''sed' to rewrite the text to a tempfile and 'mv' to move the tempfile back to the filename.

Code:

function help() { echo "Bash scripting guides:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html 
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/index.html 
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/"; }

BTW, threads like these are usually found in the "Programming" forum. I'll move it there since this ain't distro-specific.

wjevans_7d1@yahoo.co · 01-22-2007, 06:44 AM

Sure. Use the "find" command to find all HTML files within a specified folder. (This will drill down to subfolders if necessary.)

Then on those files, use the "sed" command to replace the source text with the replacement text. You may wish to do this by using the sed command to read the file containing the keyword and writing another file containing the sed command to use on each HTML file. This sed command should write from the original file to some temporary file name, and then use the "cp" command to copy the new temporary file back to the original file.

For further info, try these commands:

man find
man sed
man cp

This should get you started. Once you've written your script, check it out on a new directory in which you've written some fake test data, just to make sure it doesn't wipe out all your data.

If you have difficulty with your script, write back!

Hope this helps.