I am fairly new to this stuff, and I need a shell file to loop through all ".xml" files in a folder, and do some text replacements. So far I have come up with this:
sed "s/old_text/new_text/g" testfile.xml -i
However, I want this to run on all xml files in the current folder, not just on "testfile.xml". Furthermore, how can I make a backup of the original file ?
Any input is more than welcomed! Thankls a lot!
To run sed on all the xml files, just specify the wildcard
sed "s/old_text/new_text/g" *.xml -i
To create a backup, just specify the extension after -i:
sed "s/old_text/new_text/g" *.xml -i~
Note that's usually better to use XML aware tools to handle XML.
old_text nor new_text contain any of $, /, \1, &, ?, *, (, ), [, ], \+, ., etc. Just be aware that sed does NOT operate on strings, it operates on regexps with a restricted character set. See stackoverflow.com/questions/29613304/… and consider using a tool that does operate on strings, e.g. awk. You can reduce the risk of breakage slightly by using single quotes instead of double around the command.
For all .xml files that lie in the current directory:
sed -i.bak 's/old_text/new_text/g' *.xml
To recurse into subdirectories, combine with find:
find . -name '*.xml' -exec sed -i.bak 's/old_text/new_text/g' '{}' \;
The backup files will end in .xml.bak this way (the parameter to -i is appended to the original file name).
a practical shell script, if you intend to sanitize a bunch of files with a number of measures – things that will get a little impractical on a single line...
# only take files form certain subfolders and certain extensions
# be careful to not tamper with .git or .svn folders
# - thus excluding all hidden folders as an extra precaution
# - also tampering with node_modules is a bad idea
FILES=$(find . -type f -regextype posix-extended \
-regex "^\./(public|source)/.*\.(scss|js)$" \
-not -regex ".*\/(\.|node_modules).*")
for f in $FILES
do
echo "Processing $f file..."
# all files: prune trailing whitespace on each file.
sed -i 's/ *$//' $f
if [[ $f =~ \.js$ ]]; then
echo "javascript file!"
# DO stuff
fi
if [[ $f =~ \.scss$ ]]; then
echo "scss file!"
# \b whole word matching – stackoverflow.com/a/1032039/444255
sed -i 's/\#000\b/black/g' $f
sed -i 's/\#000000\b/black/g' $f
sed -i 's/\#fff\b/white/g' $f
sed -i 's/\#ffffff\b/white/g' $f
fi
done
caveat: with great power comes great responsibility, and mass-replacement means great power...
