CLI find & replace.

[PiqueABoo]

I'm looking for a command line find and replace that will recursively search some file spec e.g. *.txt in some folder and replace "some text" with "some other text".

 

So far I've found replace.exe 1.1 (bestcode.com) which may well do the trick. Anyone used and fond of anything else for this?

 

[Have previously used and know about win32 ports of nix utils like sed]

[kmount]

sed or awk would be my recommendations.

 

Can I ask if you know of them why they aren't suitable?

[PiqueABoo]

Yup.. because it's been maybe year since I did something for real with those utils, which as lots of irksome folk used to say is about 10 years at "web-speed", and what I knew then has been displaced by the million things I've had to know since.

 

[Or: I've forgotten the syntax and I vaguely recall it was non-trivial]

[User3204]

I like Windows Grep Search Utility Home Page I know you wanted command line.. but there's also Grep for Windows or Grep for Windows

[m2d2]

To do things programatically I would probably install cygwin then use a mixture of find and sed

 

If you want to use only Microsoft tools then you could probably a mixure of FOR /R to crawl the folder tree and a VB script for the find a replace.

 

I suppose you could also Word as an IDE/runtime and knockup a quick app in VBA. It's the tree crawling that would be the tricky bit.

Edited December 20, 2008 by m2d2

[kmount]

Wouldn't bother with cygwin, the gnu win32 binaries are sufficient.

[m2d2]

Wouldn't bother with cygwin, the gnu win32 binaries are sufficient.

 

Yeah but I don't remember if gnu tools binaries had a find equivalent.

[kmount]

It has findutils which includes find, locate, etc.

[mac_shinobi]

I like Windows Grep Search Utility Home Page I know you wanted command line.. but there's also Grep for Windows or Grep for Windows

 

Quick google and I found this :

 

FART: Find And Replace Text

 

Not sure if thats of any use

[PiqueABoo]

::sob:: Have been getting along fine with this, but now *some* of the files I want to fiddle with in a recursive trawl through some folders are UTF-16 (unicode). Don't suppose anyone has ever seen the kind of util described at the start of the thread that also automagically handles that?

[mossj]

I know you said cmd line, but you could set the folder as a dreamweaver local site and use find & replace on it all.... I think it should work.

[RabbieBurns]

Ive been using a lot of python scripts of late, and know they can handle unicode.

 

Search and replace text in a file. « ActiveState Code

 

maybe someone would be able to modify one of them that works with unicode

[PiqueABoo]

..then it dawned on me that I'd already spent more time looking for this util than it would take to write, and it only took a couple of dozen significant lines of C# to make one Good-Enough-For-Me[tm].

 

The only real trick was not taking UTF8 (the encoding reported for ye olde text files) at face value, because it says that about binary files too. Not that I'm expecting to meet lots of .EXEs renamed to .TXT, but you never know - so for now I just scan through UTF8 files and if I hit a 0x00 decide it's not text.

 

Will make it more bomb-proof sometime and post it.