[NBLUG/talk] command line search/replace

[Ross Thomas]

On Thu, 2 Nov 2006 16:26:41 -0800, "Barry Stump" <barry.stump at gmail.com>
said:
> 
> .... or shall I open all matching files in vim and use :%s/this/that/gc
> on every buffer?  Any other ideas?

I think your about as close to the optimal solution as you can get.
However, if you can supply a list of files, you can mitigate a lot of
the typing this way:

   cat file_list | xargs -l1 vim -c '%s/thiis/that/gc'

(that's dash-el-one after the xargs).

or even:

   cat file_list |
      while [read line] ; do
          vim -c '%s/this/that/gc' "$line"
      done

This will invoke vim on each file and start the search & replace
immediately.  Obviously, 'cat file_list' can be anything that gives
one pathname per line, e.g. find, etc.

HTH.

Ross.

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