Re: how to search/replace text in mutliple files?

["Steven W. Orr" <steveo@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, Feb 11th 2004 at 15:10 -0400, quoth Trevor Smith:

=>On February 11, 2004 09:33 am, Piero Calucci wrote:
=>> btw if you are going to _replace_ text you should better look at sed or
=>> perl one-liners

Here's something I've been using for years:

replace_str
---------snippity------------------------Start here--------------------
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -i.old -w
use strict;

my $from_text = shift;
my $to_text = shift;

while( <> )
{
    s/$from_text/$to_text/go;
    print;
}
---------snippity------------------------End here--------------------


Just say something 

replace_str oldstr newstr *.html

or if you have a lot of files

find blah | xargs replace_str oldstr newstr

Don't use the find -exec \; trick. It'll start a seperate child process 
for each file it operates on.

-- 
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steveo at syslang.net