Mass find and replace with / as one item that needs to be replaced.

Jeffrey Strain JStrain at ldsbc.edu
Mon Jan 3 16:20:59 UTC 2005


Stuart,

Yes, that is exactly what I needed.  Sorry for not being clear enough
for the other guys.

Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 20:11:14 +0000
From: Stuart Sears <stuart at sjsears.com>
Subject: Re: Mass find and replace with / as one item that needs to be
	replaced.
To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list <redhat-list at redhat.com>
Message-ID: <200501012011.14523.stuart at sjsears.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="iso-8859-1"

On Saturday 01 January 2005 16:07, Jeffrey Strain wrote:
> need to find and replace a path in many files.  I am wondering how to
do
> this.
>
> I tried using perl -pi -e, but do not know how to replace the path
> without messing up the command due to the / in the path.  Any
assistance
> would be greatly appreciated.
If I understand this correctly you have a number of files which contain
text 
similar to
/path/to/a/directory
and you want to replace this text with something like
/a/different/directory

personally I lean towards sed on this one.
the / as a pattern separator is not set in stone - you can use almost
anything 
you want (at least with sed, you can. dunno about perl).
so a command similar to

sed -i.orig 's,/path/to/a/directory,/a/different/directory,g'
myfilename

will do the actual replacement for you.
sed now does in-place editing.
the -i.orig will backup the original version of myfilename as
myfilename.orig

all you need to do now is give it the correct files to work with.
-- 
Stuart Sears RHCE, RHCX
I have found little that is good about human beings.  In my experience
most of them are trash.
		-- Sigmund Freud


Jeff Strain
Database Administrator
LDS Business College
(801) 524-8189
jstrain at ldsbc.edu




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