Shell Programming and Scripting

I found this search and replace method on another site:

Code:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/find/replace/g'

It worked fine except for the fact that it changed ownership on all the files it went through. I discovered that when my site web server suddenly couldn't serve the pages it had changed.

Is there a switch I should be setting?

Thanks.

Are you sure your files ownerchip changed with sed? it must be changed modif time of your files

After running that command, the last modified file date of every file on the server, .html files, jpgs, gifs, everything change to the time and date I ran the command. Files that did not contain the search text changed.

Had to reboot my webserver because it wouldn't access the new files. Couldn't access my webmail until after I put the ownership of the pref files back to what they were, etc.

your webserver is apache tomcat?

No, nginx. Apparently the sed changing ownership issue can be fixes by adding the -c switch to the sed command.

I'm assuming you are running the command as a user other than the user the webserver runs as. gnu sed's -i extension does not edit files in place (--in-place is a misnomer, in my opinion); it creates a temp file, deletes the original file, then renames the temp to the name of the original. The result is a new file (possibly with a different owner, if the command was not run by the original owner or the superuser (which can chown to preserve ownership)).

Alister

That's correct. I was running as root. I see from man sed that the -c switch should do the trick:

-c, --copy

use copy instead of rename when shuffling files in -i mode
(avoids change of input file ownership)