topic Re: Find and replace text string script in Operating System - Linux

Find and replace text string script

Lowell Lindeman — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 15:17:30 GMT

Hello All,

I could really use some help with a task I have been working on. I'm in the process of moving an application from one server to another. Part of this process involves me searching a directory and all sub-directories below it for text files containing the old server name and replacing that with a fully qualified DNS name.

I have been searching and reading MAN pages for a day now but have not been able to gain any ground. I have come up with a command to find all the files that need to be changed but I???m at a loss for the command to replace the text string.

# find . ???depth ???exec grep ???l ???serverA??? {} \;

Any help would greatly be appreciated.

Re: Find and replace text string script

Albert P Tobey — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 15:31:49 GMT

find . -type f -exec perl -pi -e 's/serverA/serverB.domain.com/g' {} \;

All on one line, of course.

Re: Find and replace text string script

Lowell Lindeman — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 15:43:20 GMT

Thank you for the input. I must be typing this in wrong or something because I receive the following error:

Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected end of string) at -e line 1, <> line 6917.

Re: Find and replace text string script

Robert Salter — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 17:09:52 GMT

You could try this, it isn't a one liner, but what the hey.

for i in `find . -depth -exec grep -l 'serverA' {} \; | sed 's/\.\///'`
do
sed 's/serverA/serverA.ur.domain/' $i > $i.m
mv $i.m $i
done

Re: Find and replace text string script

Paddy_1 — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 18:18:08 GMT

Typically I use the "tr" command to translate one string to another.Try man tr and use it in your loop for each file to accomplish the task.

Re: Find and replace text string script

Albert P Tobey — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 18:26:59 GMT

Try:
export LC_ALL=C
find . -type f -exec perl -pi -e 's/serverA/serverB.domain.com/g' {} \;

Or the one-liner:
LC_ALL=C find . -type f -exec perl -pi -e 's/serverA/serverB.domain.com/g' {} \;

I'm guessing you're running a very new linux distribution like RH9 or Mandrake 9 - they have unicode supported in everything possible, including perl and the shell utils. This causes trouble with a bunch of stuff like this. Hint: running acrobat on RH9 works with the LC_ALL=C trick, too.