Re: Replacing text in multiple files

[Paul Jarc]

"Jaya Reddy" <address@hidden> wrote:
> gawk '{gsub("oldstr","newstr"); print $0}' file1 > file1

In this command, the shell opens and truncates file1 for output before
gawk ever sees it.  Use this instead:
  gawk '{gsub("oldstr","newstr"); print $0}' file1 > file2
  mv file2 file1
This has the added advantage that file1 is updated atomically by mv;
anything that looks at file1 at any time will see either the complete
old version or the complete new version - never a half-written new
version.

> find /home/gnuuser/mydir -type f -exec gawk '{gsub("oldstr","newstr");
> print $0 > FILENAME }' {} \;

This should work too:
find /home/gnuuser/mydir -type f -exec \
sh -c 'gawk "$0" "$1" > "$1.tmp"; mv "$1.tmp" "$1"' \
'{gsub("oldstr","newstr"); print $0}' '{}' \;

Here, the redirection is done by the shell invoked by find.


paul