I have a large number of files that I need to do a search and replace on. At this point, I'm resigned to using the following:

find . -name '*.html' -type f -exec perl -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g;' \{\} \;

Which has two problems that I can think of:

  1. Every file acted upon spawns a new process through find's -exec option. I was thinking instead to try:

    perl -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g;' `find . -name '*.html' -type f`

    But I've had problems with that in the past when find returns a very large list.

  2. Files that do not contain the match get operated on anyway. There's a lot of extra overhead here as well, and timestamps get changed to boot. Again, I could try:

    perl -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g;' `find . -name '*.html' -type f -exec grep -l foo \{\} \;`

    But I still have all the same problems as with the first item above.

Is there another way to use perl -i on a directory recursively so that only files matching a certain criteria are updated?

elbieelbieelbie

In reply to Large scale search and replace with perl -i by elbie

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