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Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 02:54:39 +0200
From: Panagiotis Christias <christias@gmail.com>
To: david.jenkins@gmail.com
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cc: antenneX <antennex@swbell.net>
cc: Nathan Kinkade <nkinkade@ub.edu.bz>
cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Find & Replace string
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On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 21:50:17 -0000 (GMT), David Jenkins
<david.jenkins@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Something like:

find /mydir -type f -exec perl -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g' {} \;

fast and effective.

Panagiotis