Re: Looking for a program to help with a tedious job

[Holger Wahlen <H -dot- Wahlen -at- gmx -dot- de>]

Sandy Harris wrote:
> I'd use sed(1). The program would look something like:
> 
> # loop through all MIF files
> for i in *.mif
> do
> 	# read the current MIF file ($i)
> 	# edit with sed, save results in temporary file
> 	sed -f sedscript < $i > temp
> 	# replace original with edited version
> 	mv temp $i
> done

Perl might be a bit handier here because you can just use a command
line option instead of dealing with temporary files manually, and you
can also save the loop this way and do everything with just one line:
     perl -pi script *.mif

(Does Windows' DOS shell allow such a loop at all? Or do you have to
use a Unix-like shell for that as well? In the latter case using perl
also saves you from installing a second program.)

> and sedscript would be a large file alomg the lines of:
> 
> s/old name 1/New Name 1.0/
> s/xyzzy/Some other string/
> 
> These commands are just s for substitute, replacing every occurrence
> of "old name 1" with "New Name 1.0", and so on.

Every first occurrence in a line, that is; to replace all occurrences,
add "g" at the end (and a semicolon if you use perl instead of sed) of
the script line.

/HW

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