How do I replace 'php3' with 'php' inside every file in a directory.

Question

Hopefully a nice simple one.

I've got a php3 website that I want to run on php 5.2

To start with I'd just like to have every reference to the current "index.php3" _within_each_file_ (recursively) changed to "index.php" and then move on to worrying about globals etc.

K. Go!

:)

Update: Thanks a lot! I realise that my question missed the fact that the references are in each file of a website and I wanted to do it recursively in all files/folders.

Answer 1

sed -i 's/php3/php/g' *

Assuming you are using a unix-like operating system.

Answer 2

How about:

for file in *.php3
do
    sed 's/\.php3/.php/g' $file > ${file%3}
done

The for/do/done loop deals with each .php3 file in turn, editing the file and replacing each string .php3 with .php, and copying the file from something.php3 to something.php.

Added for amended question:

for file in $(find . -type f -name '*.php3' -print)
do
    sed 's/\.php3/.php/g' $file > ${file%3}
done

The '-print' can usually be omitted these days, but historically, a lot of machine time was wasted by people who forgot to add it because there was originally (pre-POSIX) no default action.

This fragment is about the simplest modification of the original code to do the extended task, but isn't necessarily the best way to do it any more - it pre-generates the entire list of files before processing any. You could instead use:

find . -type f -name '*.php3' -print |
while read file
do
    sed 's/\.php3/.php/g' $file > ${file%3}
done

However, both the amended versions can run into problems if file names or path names can contain blanks or newlines or other such characters. To avoid such issues, you have to work harder - using Perl or (GNU find + xargs) or some other techniques. If you're sane, you avoid such problems. If you've inherited a less than entirely sane setup, then you may have to delve deeper into the arcana of Unix file name handling.

Answer 3

To do this recursively, use Jonathan's answer but substitute find . -type f for *.php3. Note that the back ticks are important and you can substitute any directory for "." (i.e. the current directory). Here is a version that also renames the file in the process (*.php3 -> *.php).

#!/bin/bash
for file in `find . -type f`
do
    sed 's/\.php3/\.php/g' $file > ${file//3/}
    rm $file
done

Answer 4

find -type f -exec perl -pi -e 's/\bindex\.php3\b/index.php/g' {} \;