Question

I need to delete two blocks of text from multiple files. The two blocks are:

<sales_end_date>None</sales_end_date>
 ... some text
<unavailable_for_vod_date>None</unavailable_for_vod_date>

How would I properly do the equivalent of:

find ./ -type f -name 'xml' -exec sed -i 
    '**remove <sales_end_date>None</sales_end_date>' {} \;

Answer 1

I think you are looking for:

find . -type f -name '*.xml' -exec sed -i \
    -e '\@^<sales_end_date>None</sales_end_date>@d' \
    -e '\@^<unavailable_for_vod_date>None</unavailable_for_vod_date>@d' {} \;

But I wouldn’t call this doing it properly. The -i option to sed is arguably never proper to use at all, and parsing xml with sed is rightly considered an abomination. However, this should do the job.