search & replace in all files

[zxcv]

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  

[zxcv]

Hi guys got it thnxx

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

[Dennis Handly]

>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?

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

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@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?

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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...

[zxcv]

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 .

[zxcv]

Thanks dennis for the -i option...info

[Dennis Handly]

>Thanks Dennis for the -i option info

Note: GNU sed has that -i.

[James R. Ferguson]

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@Dennis Handly wrote:

>Thanks Dennis for the -i option info

Note: GNU sed has that -i.

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

Regards!

...JRF...

[Dennis Handly]

>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.