Re: Unix Find/Replace (Was: [OT] Shell scripting (2))

• Subject: Re: Unix Find/Replace (Was: [OT] Shell scripting (2))
• From: "Marc K. Myers" <email@hidden>
• Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 18:27:04 -0500

Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 10:33:21 -0500
To: email@hidden
From: "Jonathan Levi, M.D." <email@hidden>
Subject: Re: Unix Find/Replace (Was: [OT] Shell scripting (2))

On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 20:36:53 -0500, "Marc K. Myers" <email@hidden> wrote:

Could someone point me in the right direction as to how to do a find
and replace on files in the Unix shell? What I'm doing now is reading
the file into a variable, using a TID handler to find and replace, and
writing the contents back to the file. Since this is such a common
need there is probably a much easier way to do it via shell scripting.

Seems to me that a good, scriptable Unix answer would be sed (stream editor):

sed -e 's/myfindstring/myreplacestring/g' myfile

This version (not to be automated yet) will print the substituted
version of myfile on the terminal. If it looks OK, you can write

sed -e 's/myfindstring/myreplacestring/g' myfile > /tmp/myfile; mv
/tmp/myfile myfile

(Simply doing sed [...] < myfile > myfile will erase myfile before it
gets processed, I believe.)

Finally, you can put an AppleScript wrapper around this:

do shell script "sed [...]"

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