Re: Search & Replace in subdirectory files

[bassplayer]

# perl -p -i.bak -e 's/bilbo/frodo/g' *

This (at command prompt) will change all instances of 'bilbo' to 'frodo' in all files in the directory, creating a backup called filename.bak.

Not really sure how to make it recurse subdirectories other than adding /* on the end for each level needed:

# perl -p -i.bak -e 's/bilbo/frodo/g' */*

Be careful...

[borisz]

Not really sure how to make it recurse subdirectories other than adding /* on the end for each level needed:
 # perl -p -i.bak -e 's/bilbo/frodo/g' */*

Then we are back at File::Find.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use File::Find;
my @dirs = @ARGV;
@ARGV = ();
File::Find::find(
  {
    wanted => sub { push @ARGV, $File::Find::name if -f }
  },
  @dirs
);
$^I = '.bak';
local $_;
while ( defined( $_ = <ARGV> ) ) {
  s/bilbo/frodo/g;
  print;
}

[bassplayer]

Not necessarily. File::Find is the solution I would use if the script is to be run regularly. However, with a one time change, I would still use the command line. It's just so easy. If I have five levels to recurse, I run it five times. Granted, if there is an unknown level of subdiectories, then a folder could be missed, but this one-liner has served me well and I just thought I'd share it. TIMTOWTDI, right? I guess I should have explained that in previous reply.

[Rina]

Thank you for your replies so far; I've been reading the file::find references you gave me, going through the book, and testing your suggestions.

However, I will be more specific because I haven't gotten the result I need yet. There are some 350+ folders & subfolders so I need this to recurse.

The line where that substring exists looks like this:

//$Log: \\Server\Dir1\subDir1\subDir2\filename.cpp $

I want to search every file to replace every instance of "$Log:" with "$History:".

Either nothing happens, or the entire line before "filename.cpp $" disappears when I do one of the following:

$InputArray =~ s/Log/History/gi;

$InputArray =~ s/\$Log/\$History/gi;

$InputArray =~ s/\$Log\:/\$History\:/gi;

[borisz]

I can not see, how you lose a line, that is a error somewhere else. To replace '$Log:' with '$History:' this is enough.

$input =~ s/\$Log:/\$History:/gi;

Note that $InputArray is _not_ a array.

[Rina]

"perl -p -i.bak -e 's/\$Log/\$History/gi' * " at the command line only creates filename.ext.bak, nothing else.

Boris, you're right, but I only showed a snippet of my code. I had something else being sent to the output file instead of $InputArray.

Below is the full script, which works on a single file. Actually, I don't want to create a new file, I just want to modify the existing file, but this is what I know to do so far. I'm thinking there's a way to use "readdir" to provide the list of files so that the first line would read something like " Open (InputFile, $FileArray)".

Thanks a LOT!!!



open( InputFile, "FirstFile.txt" );
open( OutputFile, ">SecondFile.txt" );
@InputArrays = <InputFile>;

foreach $InputArray ( @InputArrays)
{
$InputArray =~ s/\$Log/\$History/gi;
chomp ($InputArray);
@myColumns = split(/\\/, $InputArray);
print (OutputFile "\n$InputArray");
}

close( InputFile );
close( OutputFile );