On Wednesday 30 April 2008, Matthew R. Lee wrote: > I have a folder full of .html files and I need to go through and > replace in each and every one of them a couple of bits of info. I > know I can do this using the following from the command line: > sed 's/VV, ppp-ppp/81, 51-67/' file.html > newfile.html | mv > newfile.html file.html > Problem is I need to do this on nearly 200 files. I assume it could > be done with a script, but I have zero experience in writing scripts. > I've looked through a few how-to's but haven't found anything I > understand sofar. I want to learn how to script, but my Prof want's > this done yesterday as the associated paper has just been published. > Cheers > Matt
bash to the rescue! try "for": for n in *html ; do sed 's/VV, ppp-ppp/81, 51-67/' $n > newfile.html ; mv > newfile.html $n ; done That assumes that every html file in the current dir that contains VV must have it changed. Adapt as needed :-) Somehow somewhere you can accomplish what you want in one line with a suitable combination of locate, find, grep, for, xargs, sed and awk -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
