Question

I’ve been trying to figure out a command that will search through 13+ files and replace
all matches and variances of forms data and replace them with form data enhancements.

The trick is that there could be [whitespace] – or _ as a separator that I would like
to preserve. I’m running form command line so I believe I could run this script multiple
times and just point it at the file, or if there’s a way to capture all files in a directory
(even including directory names) it might just be easier.

I believe its something to the tune of

sed "s/forms_data/form-data-enhancements/g ; s/forms-data/form-data-enhancements/g ; s/forms data/form data enhancements/g" oldfile > newfile

nut I’m not sure…..

variances might be

forms-data

forms_data

forms data

etcetra. Would someone mind sharing a bit of sed awk wisdom? The best I can find is something called an arrary replace but was unable to get any information on how to use it.

Thanks greatly.

Answer 1

Will this work for you –

sed -i 's/\<forms[ -_]data\>/form data enhancements/g' /path/to/files*

-i will do in-file substitution. So first pick a file and run the command without the -i option. If everything looks ok then you can go ahead and use the -i.

Update:

If you would like to retain the separators then you can do something like this –

sed -i 's/\<forms\([ -_]\)data\>/form\1data\1enhancements/' /path/to/files*