Question

If anyone is good with regex patterns, replacing strings and bash – you could do me a big favour:

I have a bunch of source files in a directory that have this line in various places. The line may well be preceded by spaces.

RELEASE_AND_NIL(_theNameOfAVariable);

I want to convert all occurences, overwriting the files with:

[_theNameOfAVariable release];

..any pointers please? I think someone showed me how to do this before with sed, but I forgot it was that long ago.

Thanks

EDIT

The actual command I used in the end was: (Thanks to @fardjad)

 find . -name '*.m' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "" "s/RELEASE_AND_NIL(\(.*\))/[\1 release\]/g"

Answer 1

you can use sed -i to perform in-place replacement and the regex replace pattern would be:

s/RELEASE_AND_NIL\((.*?)\)/\[\1 release\]/g

so you can do:

sed -ie "s/RELEASE_AND_NIL(\(.*\))/[\1 release\]/g" /path/to/your/file

and if you have bunch of source files, you can use find and xargs:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -ie "s/RELEASE_AND_NIL(\(.*\))/[\1 release\]/g"