topic Re: search & replace in all files in Operating System - HP-UX

search n r eplace in all files

zxcv — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:21:34 GMT

Hi guys ,

i would like to search for a patern in all subdirectories and then replace the same with another name..

say grep "hello" in /home/test to be replaced with "world" in all the files under /home/test

Re: search n r eplace in all files

zxcv — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 07:59:24 GMT

Hi guys got it thnxx

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i ‘s/string1/string2/’ {} \;

Re: search & replace in all files

Dennis Handly — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:02:00 GMT

>find ./ -type f -exec sed -i ‘s/string1/string2/’ {} \;

HP-UX's sed doesn't have -i.

Also your sed replacement will do substrings.

And if the file doesn't have string1, do you really want to change the modification time?

Re: search & replace in all files

James R. Ferguson — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:08:45 GMT

@Dennis Handly wrote:
>find ./ -type f -exec sed -i ‘s/string1/string2/’ {} \;

HP-UX's sed doesn't have -i.
Also your sed replacement will do substrings.
And if the file doesn't have string1, do you really want to change the modification time?

Hi:

As noted, HP-UX 'sed' lacks the GNU extension for in-place editing. Perl doesn't and it's available on virtually every HP-UX platform. Perl's regular expressions can easily address matching substrings or not, too. As for not updating files without matches, this one-liner would need to be enhanced slightly. All said:

# find . -type f -exec perl -pi.old -e ‘s/\bstring1\b/string2/’ {} +

This will process multiple files for every Perl process forked. Files will be updated in-place with a backup before modification as "*.old". The addition of the '\b' (boundry) surrounding the string to be matched tightens the criteria for replacement.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: search & replace in all files

zxcv — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:27:42 GMT

hi Guys ,

I went ahead with the perl option given by James.

It worked like a charm....for me modification time was not imp..just the replacement was.

Thanks .

Re: search & replace in all files

zxcv — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:28:55 GMT

Thanks dennis for the -i option...info

Re: search & replace in all files

Dennis Handly — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:37:21 GMT

>Thanks Dennis for the -i option info

Note: GNU sed has that -i.

Re: search & replace in all files

James R. Ferguson — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:04:12 GMT

@Dennis Handly wrote:
>Thanks Dennis for the -i option info

Note: GNU sed has that -i.

Dennis, that's what I noted in my original response :-) You usually read better ;-)

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: search & replace in all files

Dennis Handly — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:51:36 GMT

>that's what I noted in my original response

I guess I read that as Linux, rather than gnu that you could install on your HP-UX system.