On Wednesday 30 April 2008, 17:52, 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.
If all the files are in the same directory, you can do cd /your/directory for f in *.html; do sed -i 's/VV, ppp-ppp/81, 51-67/' "$f" done The -i flag tells sed to edit the file "in place", ie, the changes are made to the file itself (of course, sed does create a temporary file behind the scenes, but that is handled by sed). To stay on the safe side, I suggest specifying a suffix to -i, so that sed creates backup copies of the files, eg sed -i BAK etc. will create a backup file called "$f.BAK" when modifying "$f". When you're sure the changes are correct, you can of course delete all the BAK files. Otherwise, use them to restore the original files and start over. Hope this helps. -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
