What's the best tool to find and replace regular expressions over multiple files?

Question

Preferably free tools if possible.

Also, the option of searching for multiple regular expressions and each replacing with different strings would be a bonus.

Answer 1

Under Windows, I used to like WinGrep

Under Ubuntu, I use Regexxer.

Answer 2

I'd go for bash + find + sed.

Answer 3

Textpad does a good job of it on Windows. And it's a very good editor as well.

Answer 4

For Mac OS X, TextWrangler does the job.

Answer 5

jEdit's regex search&replace in files is pretty decent. Slightly overkill if you only use it for that, though. It also doesn't support the multi-expression-replace you asked for.

Answer 6

Perl. Seriously, it makes sysadmin stuff so much easier. Here's an example:

perl -pi -e 's/something/somethingelse/g' *.log

Answer 7

Unsurprisingly, Perl does a fine job of handling this, in conjunction with a decent shell:

for file in @filelist ; do
  perl -p -i -e "s/pattern/result/g" $file
done

This has the same effect (but is more efficient, and without the race condition) as:

for file in @filelist ; do
  cat $file | sed "s/pattern/result/" > /tmp/newfile
  mv /tmp/newfile $file
done

Answer 8

Emacs's directory editor has the `dired-do-query-replace-regexp' function to search for and replace a regexp over a set of marked files.

Answer 9

Vim for the rescue (and president ;-) ). Try:

vim -c "argdo! s:foo:bar:gci" <list_of_files>

(I do love Vim's -c switch, it's magic. Or if you had already in Vim, and opened the files, e.g.:

vim <list_of_files>

Just issue:

:bufdo! s:foo:bar:gci

Of course sed and perl is capable as well. HTH.

Answer 10

sed is quick and easy:

sed -e "s/pattern/result/" <file list>

you can also join it with find:

find <other find args> -exec sed -e "s/pattern/result/" "{}" ";"

Answer 11

For find-and-replace on multiple files on Windows I found rxFind to be very helpful.

Answer 12

I've found the tool RxFind useful (free OSS).

Answer 13

I have the luxury of Unix and Ubuntu; In both, I use gawk for anything that requires line-by-line search and replace, especially for line-by-line for substring(s). Recently, this was the fastest for processing 1100 changes against millions of lines in hundreds of files (one directory) On Ubuntu I am a fan of regexxer

 sudo apt-get install regexxer