Question

I know how to do a search and replace amongst group of files:

perl -pi -w -e ‘s/search/replace/g;’ *.php

So I can use that to search for a keyword or phrase and change it. But I have a more complicated task I dont know how to do.

I want to do a search and replace among all my php files to search for a specific Keyword and replace it with the File Name minus the extension.

Example: Search the file Mountains.php for the keyword Trees and everywhere you see Trees, replace it with Mountains

Of course I want to be able to do that in batch, for a few hundred php files all with different names, however, all containing the search term Trees.

If someone is looking for an extra challenge, haha, it would be even better if I could do a more complex scenario such as….

Example: Search the file MountainTowns.php for the keyword Trees and everywhere you see Trees, replace it with “Mountain Towns” (note the extra space, Capital Letters could would indicate where spaces go)

Thanks for your time and considering my question.

Answer 1

Well, the filename is in $ARGV, so there is not much more work needed.

perl -i -pe '($x=$ARGV)=~s{.php$}{};s{Trees}{$x}g' BlueMountains.php RedMountains.php

Add in

$x=~s{(.)([A-Z])}{$1 $2}g;

to add the space before upcased letters, for a complete line of

perl -i -pe '($x=$ARGV)=~s{.php$}{};$x=~s{(.)([A-Z])}{$1 $2}g;s{Trees}{$x}g' BlueRedMountains.php