Hello all,

I am in need of assistance in creating a script that will remove a specified block of text from multiple .htaccess files. (roughly 1000 files)

I am attempting to help with a project to clean up a linux server that has a series of unwanted url rewrites in place, as well as some rules that need to stay in place.

The series of rewrite rules that needs to be removed is the same in each file, and the htaccess files are spread throughout 100's of directories within the server.

I am not all that great with command line scripts but I know enough to navigate the server via shell and implement fairly simple scripts. Unfortunately no on else within the company has any experience within maintaining a linux server, so I was delegated to take the lead on this project.

I believe this task can be accomplished using a combination of find, grep, and sed (or awk) but I could use some help in combining these functions to complete the task.

I was able to output a list of all the files that contain the matching rules to a text file to see how extensive the changes that need to be made are going to be using the following:

find /var/www/html/vhosts -name ".htaccess" -exec grep -l "Text To Match" > output.txt {} \;

This seemed to spit out the requested information in a timely matter, now I need to add sed into the equation to actually modify the files that I found, using either the text file containing the path's to each of these files, or piping the output into sed instead of to the text file.

This is where it gets a little bit complicated and the confusion for me sets in. I figured rather than spend countless hours searching google, I would seek the assistance of some others.. that hopefully are a little more knowledgeable than me at the command line.

Can anyone chime in and explain to me how i can incorporate sed or awk into the equation to modify all of these htaccess files to only remove the block of text I specify, while leaving the remaining text in place.

Any help or direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
BoxX