[CLUE-Tech] find & replace on a tree of files

[David L. Willson]

Never let it be said that I missed an opportunity to show publically that I am
the slow kid...

I just figgered out how to do this thing, and it seemed cool to me, so I'm
sending it on to you.

The following one-liner is polluted with whacks to show you that it really
should be all-on-one-line.  Actually, you can use it all-on-one-line, or with a
whack at the end of each sub-line, like you see here.

What it does is the sub-tree beginning here (.), looking for files matching the
spec '*.hay', which could be any spec.  The one I use most often is, sadly,
'*.asp'.  Then, for each matching file, it finds each instance of 'old_needle'
and replaces that text with 'new_needle', globally.

Incidentally, don't mess with the space-whack-semicolon at the end of the
command, it matters a lot.

find . \
 -iname '*.hay' \
 -exec \
  sed -e s/old_needle/new_needle/g -i.backup {} \;
____________________
    David L. Willson
  tel://720.333.LANS
 Linux+ A+ Net+ MCSE






-------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/