Question

My intentions is to make all *.less files into style.css

I am not very familiar with this sed, however I have worked this out thanks to:
http://forums.devshed.com/unix-help-35/unix-find-and-replace-text-within-all-files-within-a-146179.html

for file in $(grep -rl ".less" *.php)
do
    sed -e "s/\/*.less/\/style.css/ig" $file > /tmp/tempfile.tmp
    mv /tmp/tempfile.tmp $file
done

Now this takes my files:

css/somefile.less
css/somefileagain.less
css/style.css
index.php

which is linked to in the php document

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/somefile.less" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/somefileagain.less" />

My result becomes

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/somefile/style.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/somefileagain/style.css" />

Which is not what I want. I want to get it to be the same path, and I think what I am missing is the * in the regexp which isn’t replaced by the sed. Is there any way to get that working, my try was to make it look like this: (and I want to replace everything from / to .less with /style.css)

\/*.less

And still that doesn’t work, maybe this approach is not the best, I need some advices if there is any flags that would replace the * as well, thanks.

Another issue I got is I cannot use -r/-R/–recursive in grep and I dont know why, I am running Debian. Any tips is appreciated.

/Marcus

Answer 1

You need to use following sed command inside your for loop:

sed -i.bak "s~/[^/]*\.less"~/style.css"~g" $file

No need to store sed’s output in a separate file and then mv that temp file back to original. All this can be done with -i option.