bash-3.2$ sed -i.bakkk -e "s#/sa/#/he/#g" .*
sed: .: in-place editing only works for regular files
I try to replace every /sa/ with /he/ in every dot-file in a folder. How can I get it working?
views:
107answers:
3
+1
A:
The glob pattern .* includes the special directories . and .., which you probably didn't mean to include in your pattern. I can't think of an elegant way to exclude them, so here's an inelegant way:
sed -i.bakkk -e "s$/sa/#/he/#g" $(ls -d .* | grep -v '^\.\|\.\.$')
Adam Rosenfield
2009-07-24 21:18:26
+1. Recommend find/xargs: find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -name '.*' | xargs sed ...
pilcrow
2009-07-24 21:24:09
+2
A:
Try this one:
sed -i.bakkk -e "s#/sa/#/he/#g" `find .* -type f -maxdepth 0 -print`
This should ignore all directories (e.g., .elm, .pine, .mozilla) and not just . and .. which I think the other solutions don't catch.
Chris J
2009-07-24 21:32:05
";" will run the command once per file, so 10 seds for 10 files. "+" will run it once passing *all* of the files, to 1 sed for 10 files.
John Kugelman
2009-07-24 22:46:15
You mean commands such as "rm .*" are unsafe to remove dotfiles? Should you prefer: find . -name ".*" -exec rm '{}' \; ?
Masi
2009-07-24 22:53:43
If I understood right, ";" is inefficient, so + is preferred with a big number of files.
Masi
2009-07-24 22:58:24