Find and replace text string script

[Lowell Lindeman]

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.

[Albert P Tobey]

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

All on one line, of course.

[Lowell Lindeman]

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.

[Robert Salter · Accepted solution]

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

[Paddy_1]

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.

[Albert P Tobey]

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.