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I am looking for a shell script that recursively traverses all .php files in a directory and performs a search & replace of a particular text pattern.
The search pattern is quite long ( > 5000 characters) so it might be saved in another textfile for convenience. Also it contains forward slash characters.
edit: i think i figured out the first part:
find . -name "*.php"
but then how do i search & replace in those files?
It can be done easily with a good combination of sed and xargs.
find . -name "*.php" | xargs -n 1 echo
will show you the power of xargs.
After that, on a sample file, you can test the regexp, with an inplace change (-i) or a backup change (-i.bak). You can also use an other character to replace '/' if your pattern/replacement already have one.
At the end, it should looks like :
pattern=`cat /path/to/pattern`; replacement=`cat /path/to/replacement`
find . -name "*.php" | xargs -n 1 sed -i -e "s|$pattern|$replacement|g"
cat /path/to/pattern; replacement=cat /path/to/replacement; find . -name "*.php" | xargs -n 1 sed -i -e "s/$pattern/$replacement/g"
sed -i -e "|$pattern|$replacement|g works well
Try:
find . -name "*.php" -exec sed -i "s/$(cat /path/to/pattern.txt)/$(cat /path/to/replacement.txt)/g" {} \;
where pattern is the pattern to search for and replacement is the text to replace it with.
The -i option for sed edits the files "in place". If you want to create a backup of the file before you edit it, use -i'.bak'.
sed by "s/$(cat /path/to/pattern.txt)/$(cat /path/to/replacement.txt)/g".
Jan 17, 2012 at 23:39
perl -p -i -e 's/originalString/targetString/g' `find . -name '*' -type f`
