search and replace

[sunil]

I've found a number of scripts on the web
using sed or perl, that can search a number of
files in a directory, and replace it with a
provided string.

I would like do such a search and replace operation
that goes into subdirectories,
and replaces a block of text that spans many lines,
and replace it with a string.

I looked at rpl, but couldn't figure out how
to use it to replace a text block.

Can anyone help?
Thanks

[Carsten Schmitz]

>
> I would like do such a search and replace operation
> that goes into subdirectories,
> and replaces a block of text that spans many lines,
> and replace it with a string.

I use a perl one-liner combined with find, like this:

perl -pi -e s#text1#text2# `find . -name "*.php"`

This goes into each *.php file in every subdirectory under the current
dir, and replaces text1 with text2. You can replace *.php with *.html
or * obviously. If you need slashes in the substitution (e.g. to alter
a pathname in multiple html files), you need to mask with a backslash,
such as s#var#var\/log#

Oh, and I think (no guarantee though, try it) it also creates some
kind of .bak files so you have backups, just in case.

[sunil]

Carsten Schmitz wrote:

s:
>
> perl -pi -e s#text1#text2# `find . -name "*.php"`
>
> This goes into each *.php file in every subdirectory under the current
> dir, and replaces text1 with text2. You can replace *.php with *.html
> or * obviously. If you need slashes in the substitution (e.g. to alter
> a pathname in multiple html files), you need to mask with a backslash,
> such as s#var#var\/log#
>
> Oh, and I think (no guarantee though, try it) it also creates some
> kind of .bak files so you have backups, just in case.

How do I use the provided script to replace a string
that spans many lines?

[Noi]

You might look at sed examples. Something like:

sed s/replace this/with this/ filename
sed "s/_samba/_samba\/\samba/" filename