Ubuntu – Search and Replace from terminal, but with confirmation

command linefindsedtext processing

In many text editors, you can do a search and replace and be given the option to inspect each found case. I'd like to be able to do something similar to this at the command line in Ubuntu. I know sed offers the ability to find and replace strings across multiple files, but is there anyway to have each replacement confirmed by the user?

Ideally, I'd like a solution that would allow me to do this "prompted" find and replace across all files within a directory.

Best Answer

How about Vim?

vim '+%s/set/bar/gc' some_file

+ is used to run a command after the file has loaded.
% runs the command over the whole buffer (file).
gc are flags to :substitute, g for acting over all expressions in the line and c for confirming each substitution.

You can't actually prevent Vim from opening up the file, but you can automate saving and exiting:

vim '+bufdo %s/set/bar/gc | up' '+q' some_file another_file

bufdo runs the command over each buffer. This includes the part after |, so changes to each buffer is saved (up).
q quits, which exits Vim since we are now at the last buffer.

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Ubuntu – command-line utility app which can find a specific block of lines in a text file, and replace it

This simple python script should do the task:


#!/usr/bin/env python

# Syntax: multiline-replace.py input.txt search.txt replacement.txt

import sys

inp = open(sys.argv[1]).read()
needle = open(sys.argv[2]).read()
replacement = open(sys.argv[3]).read()

sys.stdout.write(inp.replace(needle,replacement))

Like most other solutions, it has the disadvantage that the whole file is slurped into memory at once. For small text files, it should work well enough, however.

Ubuntu – Efficiently search sorted file

There's an essential difference between grep and look:

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, grep will find patterns even somewhere within the lines. For look the manpage states:

look — display lines beginning with a given string

I'm not using look very often, but it did work fine on a trivial example I just tried.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – command-line utility app which can find a specific block of lines in a text file, and replace it

Ubuntu – Efficiently search sorted file

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