in reply to Replacing text inside lots of files

Wait a minute... did you accidently use $1, with a one, instead of $l, lower case "L"? Not here, but on your actual command line? These two characters look remarkably alike, to the point it's utterly confusing. My advice: don't ever use "l" (lower case "L") as the name for a variable without a very good reason.

Use any other name than $l (or rather, $1). It ought to work then. I see no reason why not. Oh, and "wra" looks like another typo to me, just like the lack of a slash between the "s" and the backslash. 

perl -i~ -pe 'if($ARGV ne $z){$f=$z=$ARGV;$f=~s/\.war$//;substr($_,-11
+)=$f.$/;}' *

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update: Hmm... I actually like this better: 

perl -i~ -pe 'if($ARGV ne $z){$f=$z=$ARGV;$f=~s/\.war$//;s/.{10}$/$f/}
+' *

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or this: 
perl -i~ -pe 'if($ARGV ne $z){$z=$ARGV; s/.{10}$/$z/; s/\.war$//}' *

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Re: Re: Replacing text inside lots of files
by harald (Initiate) on Nov 03, 2003 at 10:52 UTC
    Thanks for the hint regarding the variable name. I tried this example by passing a single filename as argument. The text to be replaced has been found and replaced. But only in the first line of the file. The other occurrences have not been replaced. I use this with "active Perl" in a DOS-Box in Win2k. And using the asterisk gives the error message "Can't open *: Invalid argument".
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      Alright, now I get what you're trying to do. Your original post didn't quite make clear that the text was to be replaced everywhere in the file. Try this (formatted for Win32):

      perl -i~ -pe "if($ARGV ne $z){$f=$z=$ARGV;$f=~s/\.wra//;/(.{10})$/; $r
+=$1} s/$r/$f/g" *.wra

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      Of course, at this point the solution stops looking elegant and cool (not that it ever really did), and there are too many one-letter variables. My recommendation is to invest some time in studying Perl and create a real script to do your modifications.

      The one-liner may be cute and good for obfuscation value, but if you aren't sure what it's doing, it shouldn't go into production/be handed in for your assignment, etc. By the way, this time it's a one, not an el.

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[d/l]
        This works great! And helped me to understand how to form regular expressions. Thanks again.
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