Linux Blog

A Co-Worker wanted to edit a number of files in a directory that contained a lot of files. Each file that needed to be edited contained a function that needed to be replaced. Since it was production data we did not want to do a backup and run a sed find and replace for all files and risk screwing something up we decided to use vi to edit a list of files. Here is what I came up with to do that:

vi `grep function\_name * -n |cut -d : -f 1 | uniq`

If it were me, I would not have wanted to type sed find and replaces and would have done something like this because I’m lazy and I like to live on the edge:

 grep function\_name * -n | cut -d : -f 1 | uniq | while read i; do cp $i $i-bak; sed 's/function_name/new_function_name/g' $i-bak > $i; done;

Rather than editing them with vi it makes a -bak file, and uses sed to replace function_name with new_function_name. It does this from the bak file into the original. Some may think it’s kind of scary not making a backup, but I figure the -bak file should be enough depending on the operation. Make a backup if you value your data though.