piping into -pie (aka site-wide search and replace in a line)

having spent the morning trying to work out how to pipe file paths from find into a perl edit-in-place operation, I thought i might as well leave the answer here for other searchers: Use xargs, in short, to pass the results in a properly separated way to the perl command.

(man xargs, man find and perldoc perlrun for the details.)

This example replaces all instances of /images/ with /other_images/ in all *.html files in or beneath the current directory.


find . -iname "*.html" -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 perl -pi.bak -e "s/\/im
+ages\//\/other_images\//ig"

#or revised following comments below (for which thanks):

find . -iname "*.html" -print0 | xargs -0 perl -pi.bak -e "s/\/images\
+//\/other_images\//ig"
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•Re: piping into -pie (aka site-wide search and replace in a line) by merlyn (Sage) on Oct 16, 2003 at 15:40 UTC
The "-n 1" isn't necessary. A "-pi.bak -e XXX" command can take many arguments. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply]
Re: piping into -pie (aka site-wide search and replace in a line) (faster) by tye (Sage) on Oct 16, 2003 at 15:42 UTC
You'll fork and exec("perl",...) a lot fewer times if you drop the "-n 1" from xargs. This could be significantly faster in some cases. - tye	[reply]