Earl C. Ruby III » Perl http://earlruby.org this must be the place Sat, 17 Dec 2011 22:20:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 One-line search and replace command using Perl http://earlruby.org/2009/09/one-line-search-and-replace-command-using-perl/ http://earlruby.org/2009/09/one-line-search-and-replace-command-using-perl/#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:25:56 +0000 Earl Ruby http://earlruby.org/?p=118 I’ve been using these one-line commands for over a decade. They’re a really easy way to do a search and replace across many files using a Perl regular expression.

This example replaces all instances of the word “old” with the word “new” in “myfile”, saving the old file version as “myfile.bak”:

# perl -i.bak -pe 's/old/new/g;' myfile

This replaces all instances of the word “old” with the word “new” in all of the .html files in the current directory:

# perl -i.bak -pe 's/old/new/g;' *.html

This does the same thing, but also updates all .html files in all subdirectories:

# find . -name '*.html' -exec perl -i.bak -pe 's/old/new/g;' {} \;

Hope you find this useful.

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