How can I do bulk search and replace with Perl?

Question

Hi:

I have the following script that takes in an input file, output file and replaces the string in the input file with some other string and writes out the output file.

I want to change the script to traverse through a directory of files i.e. instead of prompting for input and output files, the script should take as argument a directory path such as C:\temp\allFilesTobeReplaced\ and search for a string x and replace it with y for all files under that directory path and write out the same files.

How do I do this?

Thanks.

$file=$ARGV[0];

open(INFO,$file);
@lines=<INFO>;
print @lines;

open(INFO,">c:/filelist.txt");

foreach $file (@lines){
   #print "$file\n";
   print INFO "$file";
}

#print "Input file name: ";
#chomp($infilename = <STDIN>);

if ($ARGV[0]){
   $file= $ARGV[0]
}

print "Output file name: ";
chomp($outfilename = <STDIN>);
print "Search string: ";
chomp($search = <STDIN>);
print "Replacement string: ";
chomp($replace = <STDIN>);

open(INFO,$file);
@lines=<INFO>;
open(OUT,">$outfilename") || die "cannot create $outfilename: $!";

foreach $file (@lines){    
    # read a line from file IN into $_
    s/$search/$replace/g; # change the lines
    print OUT $_; # print that line to file OUT
}
close(IN);
close(OUT);

Answer 1

Try this

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

@files = <*>;
foreach $file (@files) {
  print $file . '\n';
}

Take also a look to glob in Perl:

• http://perldoc.perl.org/File/Glob.html
• http://www.lyingonthecovers.net/?p=312

Answer 2

I know you can use a simple Perl one-liner from the command line, where filename can be a single filename or a list of filenames. You could probably combine this with bgy's answer to get the desired effect:

perl -pi -e 's/original string/new string/' filename

And I know it's trite but this sounds a lot like sed, if you can use gnu tools:

for i in `find ./allFilesTobeReplaced`; do sed -i s/original string/new string/g $i; done

Answer 3

The use of the perl single liner

perl -pi -e 's/original string/new string/' filename

can be combined with File::Find, to give the following single script (this is a template I use for many such operations).

use File::Find;

# search for files down a directory hierarchy ('.' taken for this example)
find(\&wanted, ".");

sub wanted
{
    if (-f $_)
    {
        # for the files we are interested in call edit_file().
        edit_file($_);
    }
}

sub edit_file
{
    my ($filename) = @_;

    # you can re-create the one-liner above by localizing @ARGV as the list of
    # files the <> will process, and localizing $^I as the name of the backup file.
    local (@ARGV) = ($filename);
    local($^I) = '.bak';

    while (<>)
    {
        s/original string/new string/g;
    }
    continue
    {
        print;
    }
}

Answer 4

You can do this with the -i param:

Just process all the files as normal, but include -i.bak:

#!/usr/bin/perl -i.bak

while ( <> ) {
   s/before/after/;
   print;
}

This should process each file, and rename the original to original.bak And of course you can do it as a one-liner as mentioned by @Jamie Cook