[SOLVED] Search and remove

skeates · 10-14-2010, 03:31 PM

Good Day all.

I want to be able to check the contents of a text file for a specific string and remove it from the file from the command prompt.

I would basically be searching through a number of files and if a specific string is found I would like it removed automatically.

pretty much a find and replace, were the replace is nothing. any one got any ideas on how you would do this. I already have the search part sorted just need to be able to remove the string I don't want from the multiple files.

Thanks

AlucardZero · 10-14-2010, 03:39 PM

skeates · 10-14-2010, 04:27 PM

Hi.

Thanks for that. It helped a lot.

Just if I could get a bit more help. I put this together

find / -name "filename" -exec sed -i '' 's/old/new/g' {} \;

Any way for me to make this replace an entire line with new if old is only part of the line?

for example the line may contain old 123 or old 456, but I would just use the search term old to replace the entire line with new.

Thanks

AlucardZero · 10-14-2010, 04:53 PM

Probably:

Code:

find / -name "filename" -exec sed -i '' 's/old.*/new/g' '{}' \;

(I haven't tested)

That will replace "old anything here" with "new".

That's using regular expressions.

And you want to quote your {} in case of spaces or funny characters in file names.

skeates · 10-15-2010, 06:59 AM

Thanks alot.

That did the trick.