CLI find and replace

[a thing]

How can you find and replace text in a file via CLI?

[dylunio]

I think you should be able to use the find as well as the sed commands, but I'm not sure of the syntax, so check their man pages.

[scm]

I think you should be able to use the find as well as the sed commands, but I'm not sure of the syntax, so check their man pages.

Er, sed does the finding before it replaces! find has its uses, but not for finding and replace text in a file (finding the files to operate on, that's another matter).

[a thing]

How would I find a regular expression ("[\d][\d]\)") and replace it with "*"?
sed -re "s/[\d][\d]\)/*/g" wiki
and
sed -re "s/^[\d][\d]\)/*/g" wiki
don't work. Nothing changes. I know the regular expression is right because I've tried it in Kate. I don't want to use Kate for everything because that would take a long time.

[Cabhan]

Now wait. Are you trying to change every place that [\d][\d]\) matches, or are you trying to replace every literal instance of [\d][\d]\)?

For example, do you want to replace:

a) "11)"

or

b) "[\d][\d]\)"

?


If a), what you have should work. If b), you'll probably need:

sed -re "s/\[d\]\[d\]\)/*/g" wiki

I haven't tested that, though.

[a thing]

That didn't do anything.
I want to replace 10), 11), 12) et cetera to make a WikiMedia wiki cleaner.

[lordnothing]

to use a literal asterisk in sed, you need \* not just *... * has special meaning in regex syntax (0 or more occurrences of the previous character)..

[Cabhan]

Okay, I just got it to work:

sed -re "s/^[0-9][0-9]\)/*/g" wiki

I've found that sometimes \d doesn't work very well, so you have to manually type in [0-9].

Also, that worked on my test file. Lemme know if it doesn't work for you.


EDIT:

And lordnothing, in s/FOO/BAR, BAR is interpreted as a literal string. So you can use an asterisk there.

EDIT 2:

That command actually only prints it and doesn't replace the file.

To actually replace the file, I did:

sed -re "s/^[0-9][0-9]\)/*/g" wiki -i

The "-i" will edit in place instead of outputting it to the CLI.

If you want to backup the file, you could do:

sed -re "s/^[0-9][0-9]\)/*/g" wiki -ibak

Which would copy wiki to wiki.bak, then edit wiki.

[scm]

Also, you don't need to escape the ) in pattern1. In fact you shouldn't because it has special meaning in sed when used in conjunction with \(.

echo "fred=bert" | sed 's/\([^=]*\)=\(.*\)/\2=\1/'

produces the result "bert=fred".

[scm]

to use a literal asterisk in sed, you need \* not just *... * has special meaning in regex syntax (0 or more occurrences of the previous character)..

Only in pattern1, not in the replacement string.