A couple of weeks ago I wrote about replacing text in multiple files and came up with - what I thought at the time was - a reasonable one-line solution. Behold! Thanks to the power of Unix Golf I present a more concise one-line command (working in Unix and CygWin)...
find . | xargs grep -l '{OLD}' | xargs -I % perl -pi~ -e 's/{OLD}/{NEW}/g' %
... I call this the Perl Pie solution since it's Perl's -p -i -e
flags which do much of the heavy lifting.
Perl -i specifies that files processed by the <> construct are to be edited in place. It does this by renaming the input file, opening the output file by the original name, and selecting that output file as the default for calls to
print, printf,andwrite.
-- Programming Perl
This is a much shorter solution than what I came up with earlier; 77
characters compared to the previous solution's 132. I shaved off a
couple of characters from the first half of the command by using grep
-l to only show the file name for matches - doing away with the need
for the subsequent | cut -d':' -f1 statement, and thanks to perl -i,
there's no need to explicitly open, slurp, and close the file. Less
typing means less errors. ;-)