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Redirection with xargs.

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# 1  
Old 11-20-2013
Redirection with xargs.
In a dir, i have a huge number of files and i want to replace a occurance
of say "abc" with "xyz".

I tried using grep and xargs but it fails

Code:
grep -l "abc" * | xargs -I{} "sed 's/abc/xyz/g' '{}' > '{}.tmp' "


get an error : xargs: sed 's/abc/xyz/g' '{}' > '{}.tmp' : No such file or directory

I plan to create .tmp files and rename them later
Last edited by Shivdatta; 11-20-2013 at 03:24 AM..
# 2  
Old 11-20-2013
How about a for loop?

Code:
for f in *; do sed 's/abc/xyz/g' < "$f" > "$f.tmp"; done

or I guess if you must use grep and xargs, you'll need to invoke a shell which does the redirection:

Code:
grep -l abc * | xargs -I{} sh -c 'sed "s/abc/xyz/g" "$1" > "$1.tmp"' _ '{}'

Last edited by neutronscott; 11-20-2013 at 03:54 AM..
# 3  
Old 11-20-2013
Below code will create ".tmp" as backup file and will replace abc with xyz in original file.

Code:
grep -l "abc" * | xargs -I {} sed -i".tmp" 's/abc/xyz/' {}

# 4  
Old 11-20-2013
Thanks,

both the solutions (for loop & xargs ) works fine.

Just wondering if i can avoid creating .tmp files and directly replace in the source file itself.
,something like perl does (inplace replacement)
# 5  
Old 11-20-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shivdatta
Just wondering if i can avoid creating .tmp files and directly replace in the source file itself.
,something like perl does (inplace replacement)
perl -i does not replace in the original file itself; it renames (if you provide an extension) or unlinks (if you don't) the original file and writes to a new one. The use of "in-place" in their documentation is misleading.

Similarly, sed -i does not replace in the original file either.

Regards,
Alister
Last edited by alister; 11-20-2013 at 10:26 AM..
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