What is the best tool for finding and replacing regular expressions over multiple files?

Question

Preferably, if possible, tools.

In addition, the ability to search for multiple regular expressions and each substitution with different lines will be a bonus.

Answer 1

Perl Seriously, this makes sysadmin things a lot easier. Here is an example:

perl -pi -e 's/something/somethingelse/g' *.log

Answer 2

sed is quick and easy:

 sed -e "s/pattern/result/" <file list> 

you can also join it with find:

 find <other find args> -exec sed -e "s/pattern/result/" "{}" ";" 

Answer 3

Textpad does a good job of this on Windows. And this is a very good editor.

Answer 4

Unsurprisingly, Perl does an excellent job of this, combined with a decent shell:

 for file in @filelist ; do perl -p -i -e "s/pattern/result/g" $file done 

This has the same effect (but is more effective without a race condition):

 for file in @filelist ; do cat $file | sed "s/pattern/result/" > /tmp/newfile mv /tmp/newfile $file done 

Answer 5

The Emacs directory editor has a `dired-do-query-replace-regexp 'function for finding and replacing a regular expression over a set of marked files.

Answer 6

I wrote a free command line tool for Windows to do this. It is called rxrepl , it supports unicode search and file. Some of them may be useful.

Answer 7

On Windows, I liked WinGrep

On Ubuntu, I use Regexxer.

Answer 8

For Mac OS X, TextWrangler does the job.

Answer 9

To search and replace in multiple files on Windows, I found rxFind to be very useful.

Answer 10

My personal favorite is PowerGrep from JGSoft. It interacts with RegexBuddy , which can help you create and test regular expressions, automatically support all changes (and provides undo options), provides the ability to parse multiple directories (with file name templates), and even supports file formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PDF

Answer 11

I would go for bash + find + sed.

Answer 12

Wim for salvation (and the president ;-)). Try:

 vim -c "argdo! s:foo:bar:gci" <list_of_files> 

(I really love the Vim -c switch, it's magic. Or if you are already in Vim and opened files, for example:

 vim <list_of_files> 

Only problem:

 :bufdo! s:foo:bar:gci 

Of course, sed and perl also capable. NTN.

Answer 13

I have the luxury of Unix and Ubuntu; In both cases, I use gawk for everything that needs to be searched and replaced in turn, especially for line by line substrings. Recently, it was the fastest for processing 1100 changes in millions of lines in hundreds of files (one directory) On Ubuntu, I am a fan of regexxer

  sudo apt-get install regexxer 

Answer 14

There is a free alternative on Windows that works best: Notepad ++

Go to the "Search" → "Find Files" section. You can specify a directory, a file template, set regular expressions, then look up matches and finally replace all files recursively.

Answer 15

I like this tool:

http://www.abareplace.com/

Gives you a "how you type" preview of its regular expression ... FANTASTIC for those who are not very versed in RE ... and very quickly change hundreds or thousands of files at a time ...

And then give UNDO your changes as well ...

Very nice...

Patrick Style - http://www.podiotools.com

Answer 16

If "text panel" is a valid answer, I would suggest Sublime Text to go down.

Editing multiple cursors is an even more efficient way to make replacements in general that I find, but its "Find in Files" "is the top level for replacing voluminous regular expression / regular search.

Answer 17

jEdit regex search & file replacement is pretty decent. However, slightly overdo it if you only use it for this. It also does not support the variable you requested.

Answer 18

I found the RxFind tool useful (free OSS).

Answer 19

Brackets (source code, deb / Ubuntu, OSx and Windows) has a good visualization of the results, allowing them to individually apply the replacement. You can search for standard or case-sensitive texts and regular expressions. Very important: you can exclude file and directory templates in the search.