replace_string

replace_string consistently changes/modifies any number of text files, either interactively or in batch mode, either with or without keeping backups, preserve modes/owner when run as root.

It enables you to do a dry-run in interactive mode to see how your regular expressions will work, before you process all files in batch mode.

Features:

• do multiple search-replace or query-search-replace operations
• search-replace expressions can be given on the command line or read from a file
• processes multiple input files
• recursively descend into directory and do multiple search/replace operations on all files
• user defined perl expressions are applied to each line of each input file
• optionally run in paragraph mode (for multi-line search/replace)
• interactive mode
• batch mode
• optionally backup files and backup numbering
• preserve modes/owner when run as root
• ignore symbolic links, empty files, write protected files, sockets, named pipes, and directory names
• optionally replace lines only matching / not matching a given regular expression

Download replace_string

The md5sum for revision 1.10 is 875f730ea7e8122d49a9e72a292a906c

Examples

License

replace_string is freely available under the terms of the OpenSource "Artistic License"
in combination with the Addendum A at the end of this page. See Full License Text

Disclaimer

replace_string is a pretty powerful tool which gives you the freedom of applying any perl expressions to every line in a number of files... and possibly destroying all your data if you are not careful.. so don't come to me wining, you have been warned.
BE EXTRA CAREFUL using it!!!
• make backups of your real data before you run replace_string
• try out your serach/replace operations on a small copy of your real data
• do a dry-run in query-mode (on a copy of your data!) before you process your real data!
• use version control software, such as CVS or RCS to keep old versions of your files!
• again+again: make backups of your valuable data!

---

Maintainer: Tilo Sloboda myfirstname . mylastname @ Google Email last update: Mon Apr 4 19:00:10 PDT 2011