Substitution Operator Problems 1

[dkeim]

I am trying to do a global replacement of a value in a directory. The command I am using is

"perl -p -i -e 's|<old text>|<new text>|g' *"

This of course touches all files in the directory and I am getting errors on executable programs that it pass through. Is there a way to select just the ones that need changing and then do the perl command just on that one? Such as

grep "<old text>" * |exec perl -p -i -e 's|<old text>|<new text>|g' $1

or something like that.

 

[ishnid]

You could use a BEGIN block to weed out all non-textual files:

$ perl -p -i -e 'BEGIN{@ARGV = grep -T, @ARGV} s|<old text>|<new text>|g' *

 

[dkeim]

Super - it worked like a champ!!!!!!!!

 

[dkeim]

I am devising a method to send two values to a script that will does your command.

script name: cngit

perl -p -i -e 'BEGIN{@ARGV = grep -T, @ARGV} s|$1|$2|g' *

But it doesn't seem to be working. Any ideas

 

[ishnid]

$1 and $2 are empty in that script. What are you expecting them to hold?

 

[dkeim]

The script that I created, 'chgit' would be used on the command line like this.

$ chgit leia anakin

leia is an example of the old phrase to be replaced.

anakin is an example of the new phrase to be used.

 

[brigmar]

You're expecting the OS to interpolate into that literal string.
I'd imagine that you need to pass those parameters into the perl script...

perl -p -i -e 'BEGIN{($p1,$p2)=(shift,shift);@ARGV = grep -T, @ARGV} s|$p1|$p2|g' $1 $2 *[code]

This would work for single word substitutions.

 

[ishnid]

What's chgit?

 

[dkeim]

Actually, my command did work after all. I was testing in one of my test directories and forgot that UNIX/Linux is case sensitive. The command '$ chgit leia anakin' could not work because the word was LEIA (uppercase).

So everything appears to be just fine.

Thanks again

 

[dkeim]

chgit is just a one line script that runs your perl command except with input variables.

Thanks for your help, everything seems to be working.