Perl in file pattern substitution

[problem]

You want to substitute a pattern in a number of files, making backups and modifying in place on the fly.

And you can do this in Perl – with a one liner! 🙂

[/problem]

[solution]

An amazing bit of Perl and so quick!

This one liner will replace all occurrences of a pattern, with your replace and even create backups of files edited.

[/solution]

[example]

You can even pass in a wildcard.

perl -pi'.bak' -e's/pattern/replace/g' filename
Here is a demo of replacing all occurrences of unix with UNIX, in all html files.

perl -pi'.bak' -e 's/unix/UNIX/g' *htm*

[/example]

[reference]

[tags]Perl infile pattern substitution, Perl Coding School[/tags]

[/reference]

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