How to mass Search & Replace in text files.

Fri May 1 16:27:57 UTC 2009

D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> 
> Your question about recursive searching shows that you haven't got a
> good internal model about how the shell ecosystem works.
> 

Is it showing!... ;)

I have only used shell to do basic file moves/renames and launching 
other programs.

> If you want recursion, you generally have to use find(1).  The latest
> BASH (which you probably don't have) adds ** for this purpose.
> 

Thought so, but doesn't hurt to ask. (much... :) )

> Here's a guess.  Untested.  Any bug might be very destructive.
> 
>   find /root/of/tree/with/html -name '*.html' -print0 \
>   | xargs --no-run-if-empty --null sed -i -e 's/BadJS//g'
> 

So far the make-up of the JS has foiled my attempts at 's/JS//'.

I tried manually \ escaping the JS in a perl script, to no avail.

As this script is between the </head> and <body> tags, can we say 
'everything between'?

> Notes:
> 
> 
> - are you sure that this is all the damage that needs fixing?
>   Proving that would seem tough and a mistake might be bad.

All the files are (supposed to be) raw html. No scripts etc.

Lance
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