Re: Sed and redirection into the same file

Further reading on the perl find/replace solution yielded another tip
for command line non-gurus like myself. Use:

perl -pi.bak -e 's/foo/bar/g' file1 file2 file3 ...

The .bak option to -i will backup the files before overwriting them. A
useful safety net if you're making changes to important files.

Josh.


On 9/29/06, David <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Friday 29 September 2006 16:08, David wrote:
> > On Friday 29 September 2006 15:53, Joshua Bassett wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > I was wondering if anyone could help me with a find/replace command I
> > > have been trying to get to work:
> > >
> > > for x in `grep -lr 'foo' app | grep -v "svn"`; do sed 's/foo/bar/'
> > > <${x} >${x}; done
> > >
> > > I want to replace the word 'foo' with the word 'bar' in all files in
> > > the 'app' directory', except for files in directories that contain
> > > 'svn' anywhere in the directory name.
> > >
> > > It all appears to work fine, but the problem is when redirecting the
> > > output back into the same file...I end up with empty files! For
> > > example, the following works fine:
> > >
> > > for x in `grep -lr 'foo' app | grep -v "svn"`; do sed 's/foo/bar/'
> > > <${x} >${x}.new; done
> > >
> > > Clearly it's something to do with the <${x} >${x} part. What am I missing
> > > here?
> > >
> > > Thanks in advance,
> > >
> > > Josh.
> >
> > You can use perl.. simple.
> >
> > for i in `grep -L svn *` ; do
> >         perl -pi -e 's/search/replace/g' $i
> > done
> >
> > HIH.
> >
> > David
>
> Replying to my own mail... as I just noticed the directories.
>
> #!/bin/sh
> files=`find app -type f \! -name \*svn\* -print`
> for i in $files ; do
>         perl -pi -e 's/search/replace/g' $i
> done
>
> HIH.
> David
>
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