Change string occurrences in file while respecting DOS new line sequences

Question

I use Visual Studio for my C# development while using Cygwin for some of the tasks that require scripting. Recently I wanted to change all occurrences of string AAA to BBB in my project's files. I started with old trusty sed but, to my dismay, it changed DOS new line sequences to Unix ones.

Here's what I used:

sed -i 's/AAA/BBB/g' $(grep -rl AAA /cygdrive/c/project_path)

It seems there is no sed switch that would do what I want. Is there some other Unix tool that could help me?

EDIT: In between C# files there are some other scripts that have Unix new line characters. It would be best if this tool didn't change them to DOS ones. :)

Answer 1

There gotta be a built-in function for this in VS.

If not, you can use good old vi:

vi +'bufdo %s/AAA/BBB/g | update' +q $(grep -rl AAA /cygdrive/c/project_path)

Answer 2

You can use Cygwin's perl instead. Typical sed commands map easily to Perl. Note that the regex syntax is different (extended regular expressions in Perl, basic regular expressions in sed).

perl -i -pe 's/AAA/BBB/g' $(grep -rl AAA /cygdrive/c/project_path)

Note that parsing the result of a command substitution as a list of files is brittle. It'll break if there are spaces or backslashes in the file names; both are fairly common under Windows (you get backslashes when a path hasn't been translated from native to cygwin, for example when it comes from an environment variable). Use xargs -d '\n' instead (there are no newlines in Windows file names).

grep -rl AAA /cygdrive/c/project_path | xargs -d '\n' perl -i -pe 's/AAA/BBB/g'