Re: Replacing text in multiple files

[Paul Jarc]

Jim Meyering <address@hidden> wrote:
> You might want to limit the process to files that will
> actually be changed -- sometimes it's best not to update timestamps,
> and if you're making backups as this is, there's no point in making
> a .bak file if it's identical to the original:
>
>   find . -type f -print0 | grep -l oldstr \
>     | xargs -0 perl -pi.bak -e 's/oldstr/newstr/g'

One of us is misunderstanding grep's -l option.  AIUI, -l means that
grep will process input normally, but will output only filenames where
matches are found.  So it won't work here (even if filenames were
newline-terminated instead of null-terminated, which grep certainly
isn't expecting).  Rather:

find. -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sh -c '
set "$0" ${1+"$@"}
for i do
  grep -q oldstr "$i" && perl -pi.bak -e s/oldstr/newstr/g "$i"
done'

But if you're going to use Perl, you might as well do all of it in
Perl.


paul