asked on

Search and replace - ksh and perl

Sorry, I didn't have time to research this on my own.
I am looking for a ksh and perl script to go thru all files in all subdirectories of a directory
and do a search and replace for all instances of a specific server name.

go thru all files and search for sun100 and change it to sun101

Thanks for your help!

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

wesly_chen

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ahoffmann

I'd go with a variation of wesly_chen's last simple suggestion:

find /path/to/dir -type f | xargs perl -i.bak -pe 's/sun100/sun101/g'

SOLUTION

manav_mathur

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ahoffmann

exactly what I had in mind (but didn't dig to deep into perl, which is more performant with File::Find ;-)

NovaDenizen

The perl regexp 's/sun100/sun101/g' will match all occurances of sun100, including in terms like "datsun100" or "bosun10043". It might be worthwhile to change the regexp to something like 's/\bsun100\b/sun101/' to exclude partial-word matches. Keep in mind that perl considers all letters, numbers, and the '_' as word characters, so something like "sun100_blah" will be modified by the partial word match and ignored by the full word match.

Tintin

If you have GNU grep, you could do:

for file in `grep -lr sun100 /some/dir`
do
sed 's/sun100/sun101/g' $file >/tmp/$$ && mv /tmp/$$ $file
done

theoradically

ASKER

I didn't get a chance to run Wesleys script until tonight.
When I run it, I get

$ ./search_and_replace.sh sun100 sun101
./search_and_replace.sh: ===: cannot open
./search_and_replace.sh: ===: cannot open
./search_and_replace.sh: ===: cannot open
./search_and_replace.sh: ===: cannot open
./search_and_replace.sh: ===: cannot open
./search_and_replace.sh: ===: cannot open
./search_and_replace.sh: ===: cannot open
./search_and_replace.sh: ===: cannot open
./search_and_replace.sh: ===: cannot open
./search_and_replace.sh: ===: cannot open

I checked the syntax of the script and have permissions on the files within the dir.
Can you offer any other suggestion?

theoradically

ASKER

As soon as I sent the last request, I found the error.

perl -i -pe "s/$search_string/$replace_string/g" $files <=== use perl for faster result

needed to be

perl -i -pe "s/$search_string/$replace_string/g" $files # <=== use perl for faster result

Let me work with the perl variations a little and I'll award the points. Thanks everyone

wesly_chen

I'm glad to hear you find out the problem by your own.

I learned a lot from other experts here in EE.
Sometimes I prefer to write a longer but more comprehensive script so I can use it later on
for different pupose.

In the search_and_replace.sh,
perl -i -pe "s/$search_string/$replace_string/g" $files
will NOT be susceptible to shell command line buffer problems since it is in "for" loop.

manav_mathur

>perl -i -pe "s/$search_string/$replace_string/g" $files

Was not talking about this, but
perl -i -pe 's/sun100/sun101/g' `find . -type f`