replace

Description

The replace utility program changes strings in place in files or on the standard input. Invoke replace in one of the following ways:

shell> replace from to [from to] ... -- file_name [file_name] ...
shell> replace from to [from to] ... < file_name

"from" represents a string to look for and "to" represents its replacement. There can be one or more pairs of strings.

A from-string can contain these special characters:

Character
Description

Character

Description

^

Match start of line.

$

Match end of line.

\b

Match space-character, start of line or end of line. For an end \b the next replace starts looking at the end space-character. A \b alone in a string matches only a space-character

Use the -- option to indicate where the string-replacement list ends and the file names begin. Any file named on the command line is modified in place, so you may want to make a copy of the original before converting it. replace prints a message indicating which of the input files it actually modifies.

If the -- option is not given, replace reads standard input and writes to standard output.

replace uses a finite state machine to match longer strings first. It can be used to swap strings. For example, the following command swaps "a" and "b" in the given files, /file1andfile2*:*

shell> replace a b b a -- file1 file2 ...

The replace program is used by msql2mysql.

Options

replace supports the following options.

Option
Description

Option

Description

-?, -I

Display a help message and exit.

-#debug_options

Enable debugging.

-s

Silent mode. Print less information about what the program does.

-v

Verbose mode. Print more information about what the program does.

-V

Display version information and exit.

This page is licensed: CC BY-SA / Gnu FDL

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