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Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 21:50:17 -0000 (GMT)
From: "David Jenkins" <david.jenkins@gmail.com>
To: "antenneX" <antennex@swbell.net>
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cc: Nathan Kinkade <nkinkade@ub.edu.bz>
cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Find & Replace string
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On Thu, 9 December, 2004 18:50, antenneX said:
> No, I want to interrogate several hundred thousand files throughout
> several thousand directories to find/replace a single string within
> each
> file found. The string may appear more than once in a file.

Try the following (make sure you have a backup first ;))

perl -pi -e 's/STRING_TO_FIND/STRING_TO_REPLACE_WITH/g' filename

e.g. to replace all instances of foo with bar in a file called test
you'd do:

perl -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g' test

You'd need to write a shell script to recursively run this on in each
subdirectory.

Cheers,
David