simple sed query - UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

schmark · #1 07-09-2003

hi,

i would like to replace a string in a series of files with another string, without outputting to new files. is this possible?

i've tried using sed, and started by trying to alter the contents of one file...

sed 's/string1/string2/g' file.txt

but while this does the replacement on screen, the file is not altered.

any ideas...please? and how could i get this to work on *.txt?

oombera · #2 07-09-2003

There's no way that I know of to do that without using a temporary file.. if you want to manipulate several files, you'll need a loop:

Code:

for FILE in `ls *.txt`
do
  sed 's/string1/string2/g' < $FILE > TMP_00
  mv TMP_00 $FILE
done

sssow · #3 07-17-2003

We can do this using perl. If you are not very particular about sed, you may use the following

perl -p -i -e "s/string1/string2/g" file1

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