Subject: Re: search and replace tool
From: Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 16:00:18 -0800

On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 12:13:38PM -0800, Rafael Kitover wrote:
> Not really cygwin specific, you can do something like:
> 
> perl -pi -e 's/old text/new text/' `find /where -name '*.txt'`
> 
> note those are backticks surrounding the find.
> 
> Use -pi.bak to make backup files in case you screw up. You will of course need
> to know how to use regular expressions (see man perlretut). If you need to do
> multiline replaces, you should probably write a script, or use some other
> solution.

Under cygwin, .bak is the default.  From perl's README.cygwin:
   Inplace editing C<perl -i> of files doesn't work without doing a backup
   of the file being edited C<perl -i.bak> because of windowish restrictions,
   therefore Perl adds the suffix C<.bak> automatically if you use C<perl -i>
   without specifying a backup extension.

Other options are sed or awk.

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