Find and Replace Across Multiple Files
Have you ever needed to change the same thing in a load of files and have had to sit there and go through each one in turn and make the same change?
This is a really useful and simple command:
perl -pi -w -e 's/from text/to text/g;' *
It simply goes through all files matching * and runs the regular expression, ‘s/from text/to text/g’ – which means replace all instances of “from text” with “to text”. nifty!
Handy. I’ve previous just loaded all the files into a Textmate project, and then used a project wide search and replace, but that one liner is even easier.
Yeah – it’s very nifty! – great for updating things like DNS records in bulk!
haha clearly what you worked out when moving servers then?
Indeed!