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Full Discussion: Perl find & replace - what am I doing wrong?
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Perl find & replace - what am I doing wrong? Post 302814389 by sudon't on Wednesday 29th of May 2013 11:25:03 AM
Old 05-29-2013
Perl find & replace - what am I doing wrong?
Hi!
I have a directory full of .plist type files from which I need to delete a line. Not every file contains the line, but of course I'd like to do it recursively. The line which I want to delete is:

Code:
		<string>com.apple.PhotoBooth</string>

and looks like this in its native habitat:

Code:
	<string>748 352 640 526 0 0 1440 878 </string>
	<key>excludedHosts</key>
	<array>
		<string>com.apple.PhotoBooth</string>
		<string>com.apple.iChat</string>
	</array>
	<key>frameworkVersion</key>

Here is what I tried, as well as the error which followed:

Code:
$ perl -pi -e ~/Library/Compositions/Compound\ Eye.qtz 's/<string>com.apple.PhotoBooth</string>\n//g' 
Bareword found where operator expected at -e line 1, near "/Users/rick"
	(Missing operator before rick?)
syntax error at -e line 1, near "/Users/rick"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

The interesting thing (to me) is that it seems to be complaining about syntax in the actual directory - /Users/Rick - but I used the abbreviated form - ~/
I didn't really understand what it was complaining about, so I combined all the flags and got a different error.

Code:
$ perl -pie ~/Library/Compositions/Compound\ Eye.qtz 's/<string>com.apple.PhotoBooth</string>\n//g' 
Unrecognized character \xDA; marked by <-- HERE after bplist00<-- HERE near column 9 at ~Library/Compositions/Compound Eye.qtz line 1.

I searched for the string "bplist00" in the file, but cannot find it. I also don't understand why it's talking about columns. I can't make heads or tails of this error. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? I'll attach one of the files, if that helps.

I'm using Mac OS 10.6.8
bash
Compound Eye.qtz.zip (5.4 KB) 
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

svn-clean

SVN-CLEAN(1)							   User Commands						      SVN-CLEAN(1)

NAME

       svn-clean - Wipes out unversioned files from Subversion working copy

SYNOPSIS

       svn-clean [options] [directory or file ...]

DESCRIPTION

       svn-clean will scan the given files and directories recursively and find unversioned files and directories (files and directories that are
       not present in the Subversion repository). After the scan is done, these files and directories will be deleted.	Files which match patterns
       in the svn-clean:ignore dir property will be spared, much as the svn:ignore property works for svn status.

       If no file or directory is given, svn-clean defaults to the current directory (".").

       svn-clean uses the SVN Perl modules if they are available. This is much faster than parsing the output of the svn command-line client.

OPTIONS

       -e, --exclude
	       A regular expression for filenames to be exluded. For example, the following command will skip files ending in ".zip":

		       svn-clean --exclude '.zip$'

	       Multiple exclude patterns can be specified. If at least one matches, then the file is skipped. For example, the following command
	       will skip files ending in ".jpg" or ".png":

		       svn-clean --exclude '.jpg$' --exclude '.png$'

	       The following command will skip the entire "build" subdirectory:

		       svn-clean --exclude '^build(/|$)'

       -f, --force
	       Files to which you do not have delete access (if running under VMS) or write access (if running under another OS) will not be
	       deleted unless you use this option.

       -N, --non-recursive
	       Do not search recursively for unversioned files and directories. Unversioned directories will still be deleted along with all their
	       contents.

       -q, --quiet
	       Do not print progress info. In particular, do not print a message each time a file is examined, giving the name of the file, and
	       indicating whether "rmdir" or "unlink" is used to remove it, or that it's skipped.

       -p, --print
	       Do not delete anything. Instead, print the name of every file and directory that would have been deleted.

       -?, -h, --help
	       Prints a brief help message and exits.

       --man   Prints the manual page and exits.

AUTHOR

       Simon Perreault <nomis80@nomis80.org>

								    2014-03-12							      SVN-CLEAN(1)
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