Re: Search and Replace

[Jeff Noxon <jeff@planetfall.com>]

On Fri, Jan 08, 1999 at 08:49:10AM -0700, John Greer wrote:
> I know that this is not Debian specific but I thought I would give it a 
> shot anyway.  I need to search a series of files for a text string 
> (grep I know) and then I need to replace that string with another.  Is 
> there a command or string of commands that I can do this in?  If 
> this is possible it will make my life much easier!!  Thanks 

You can do what you want with sed or with a simple perl script.

Example:

sed s/oldstring/newstring/g <oldfile >newfile

If you have a lot of files to do,

for x in file1 file2 file3 
do mv $x $x.old ; sed s/old/new/g <$x.old >$x ; done

You can use wildcards instead of file1...file3

Regards,

Jeff