Comments on: How Do I Replace A Text String In Many Files At Once?

By: saravanan

saravanan — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:35:36 +0000

I want to replace a string in sub directories also(in Linux), is there any specific command for that?

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 04:23:20 +0000

‘Replace’ is found in mySQL. If you don’t have mySQL, you don’t have `replace`

By: DougTheBug

DougTheBug — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:07:26 +0000

I couldn’t even find this command in Ubunto 10.04 (or in repositories). I ended up using rpl instead. Is really fun for databending images.

By: Matthew Scott

Matthew Scott — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 03:46:13 +0000

`replace` can work with files, which may be simpler than writing a shell script as mentioned above. It will even convert files in place. Say you want to change an instance of ‘foo’ to ‘bar’ in all files in a certain directory, recursively. In bash,

for i in `grep -lR foo dir/to/files`; do replace foo bar — $i; done

Simply put, use two dashes to separate filenames from the from/to strings, and it’ll convert the files.

By: Matthew Scott

Matthew Scott — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 03:43:12 +0000

`replace`

By: 2046

2046 — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:09:51 +0000

find ./* -type f -exec sed -i 's///g' {} \;

By: Eden

Eden — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:21:08 +0000

Cant see the diference… :(

By: lefty.crupps

lefty.crupps — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:28:56 +0000

Am I the only one who sees no difference in these?

>> perl -p -i -e ’s/|00000000.00|/||/g’ myfile.txt
>> I want to replace |00000000.00| with ||
>> I get a compilation error.

— —
>> You need to write it as follows:
>> perl -p -i -e ’s/|00000000.00|/||/g’ myfile.txt

By: Raj

Raj — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:25:32 +0000

thanks for sharing this info

By: walter

walter — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 06:59:39 +0000

or try this…
first make a bash script, ‘fixer.sh’

#!/bin/bash replace CHANGEFROM CHANGETO $1.tmp rm $1 mv $1.tmp $1

now run this command line…
$ grep CHANGEFROM |cut -d':' -f1 |xargs -n 1 fixer.sh

the results is that all files in the directory (or whatever you grep for) will be changed automagically.

just make sure the grep doesn’t include the fixer script itself, or it will die half-way through changing when execute permissions are reset!

;)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 21:02:00 +0000

This does the trick perfectly! Thanks for sharing this special character technique nixcraft!

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 01:41:00 +0000

You need to write it as follows: perl -p -i -e 's/|00000000.00|/||/g' myfile.txt || got some special meaning (regex) | will disable it

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:13:00 +0000

what about this line:

perl -p -i -e ‘s/|00000000.00|/||/g’ myfile.txt

I want to replace |00000000.00| with ||

I get a compilation error.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:34:00 +0000

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/298 has a fine article and discussion on Perl Pie.

By: LinuxTitli

LinuxTitli — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 23:47:00 +0000

Joe, very nice. Your tip sound yummy :) thanks for sharing with us

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 23:30:00 +0000

To use perl, just remember Perl Pie!

perl -p -i -e ‘s/hello/goodbye/g’ textfile.txt