Thanks for the hints and help!

Methyl, the number of edits is actually not that massive. Assume the run.sed file (which is really my dictionary file) has 2400 lines. Each PHP script has maybe 200 lines, and I have 200 scripts. But each script will only get about 10-15 of those replacements. BTW, my version of sed says GNU 4.2.1 and the -i flag is for "inline edit". But you are absolutely correct, I did something like this once with no backup, and it wasn't right, and I had no way to go back to the old files and try something new! Several backups here. Here's what worked (the whole thing took about 2 minutes on a 2GHz Pent, 1GB Ram, Linux):

run.sed (abbreviated):

Code:

#!/bin/sed -f
s/_BROWSER_TITLE/"School Management System"/
s/_MORE_TEXT/"You need more text"/
s/_BAD_ENTRY/"Your entry is invalid"/
....

The script to iterate through all the files:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

FILES=/home/me/swift200/*.php

for f in $FILES
do
    echo "Processing $f file..."
    ./run.sed -i "$f"
done

I'm still pretty rusty with bash scripts, but it worked! A real oddity, I tried what rdcwayx suggested the other night, thinking that the script would use bash's "built-in" variables of $1, $2, $3, etc. This did not work, and echoing the filename at each point would echo something like

working on script .//home/me/swift200/admin_manage_attendance.php

Which of course would not work. Not sure where the extra slash came from. What WOULD work was using $@ instead of $1. Again, I have no idea why, maybe it's my version of bash/linux/sed, but that was the first time I ever saw using $@.

Again, thanks everyone! Your hints got me in the right direction, and I'm all set now!