Is there any simple way to change one line in a lot of files?

Question

I'm trying to use PHP CodeSniffer, and here's the result:

-----------------------------------------------------------------
A TOTAL OF 3008 ERROR(S) AND 380 WARNING(S) WERE FOUND IN 46 FILE(S)
-----------------------------------------------------------------

There a a lot of small changes on one line (for example: change @author Olivier Pons to @author Olivier Pons <olivier.pons@gmail.com>) that I'd like to do via a shell script, or even better, via a command line, and (if possible) using regular expression.

Do you have any idea/suggestion/working solution for this problem?

Thank you!

(Note: I've already read this but it didn't help me)

Answer 1

I'm not sure what didn't help you in the link you provided, but sed seems like the right tool for this. It supports regular expression replacements, and if you pass it -i it will change files in-place:

$ sed -i 's/@author Olivier Pons/& <olivier.pons@gmail.com>/g' /path/to/your/file /path/to/another/file ...

(The & in the replacement is a shorthand that means "include the entire match")

Answer 2

I think you could use sed.

For example.

sed -i "s/@author Olivier Pons/@author Olivier Pons <olivier.pons@gmail.com>/g" `grep "@author Olivier Pons" -rl YOUR_FILE_DIR`