Directory Recursion from the Command Line?

[dvergin]

I don't use one-liners routinely, but when the boss-man asked for a quicky to make the same change in 150 files in a directory, I dashed off:

   perl -pi -e 's/this/that/' *

...and looked like a hero.

Then he said, "Make it work for a whole directory branch." I was stumped. I can (and did) write a short script to do this. But I have a lingering suspicion that there is some command-line magic that can, in effect do:

   perl -r -pi -e 's/this/that/' *

Where the '-r' switch works as in other Linux commands to cause the requested operation to be performed on all directories including and under the current one.

Sadly, there is no '-r' switch for the Perl executable.

Does anyone have a quick command-line hack (rather than a script) to accomplish the requested task.

------------------------------------------------------------
"Perl is a mess and that's good because the
problem space is also a mess." - Larry Wall

[Anonymous Monk]

See Large scale search and replace with perl -i

[dvergin]

Spooky!

I had just posted and gone to read other current items and there it was in the thread you have pointed to.

[crouchingpenguin]

You could use a quick shell like:

for file in `find . -type f -print`;do cp $file $file~ ; cat $file |se
+d -e 's/this/that/' > $file.new; mv $file.new $file;done


cp
----
"Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic."