From owner-freebsd-questions  Tue Dec 18  2:50:48 2001
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Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 11:50:43 +0100 (MET)
From: Magnus B{ckstr|m <b@etek.chalmers.se>
To: Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com>
Cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Command to make modifications on multiple files
In-Reply-To: <007701c187af$8b564d40$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
> There is probably a UNIX command that allows me to replace strings in
> multiple files all at once, but I can't remember what the name of it would
> be, and this being UNIX, I'm sure the name is not the least bit intuitive.
> Any suggestions on what command would do this?  Sort of like grep, but with
> an option to replace a string as well as just finding it.
> 

Using bourne shell, something like

for f in whatever/files/*.txt ; do
    sed -e 's/string to be replaced/new string/g' < ${f} > ${f}.tmp
    mv ${f}.tmp ${f}
done

// Magnus


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