Find and replace text on multiple files - linux

I am trying to replace a specific link which exists on many html pages with its https version. I have tried:
grep -rl "http://server.iad.liveperson.net/hc/88956865/" ./ | xargs sed -i "s/http:\/\/server.iad.liveperson.net\/hc\/88956865\//https:\/\/server.iad.liveperson.net\/hc\/88956865\//g"
When I do this, even as sudo, I am getting
sed: couldn't open temporary file ./customers/sedTR3AMu: Permission denied
customers is just the first directory in ./. So, it is hanging on the first file I reckon, but not sure what is wrong beyond that.
Any help is appreciated!

First thing you should try is to run the sed command as stand alone, for a file that you previously know that contains that string. I have the feeling that the sed command might be complaining about the / characters...
You should try changing the sed command to something like:
sed -i 's;http://server.iad.liveperson.net/hc/88956865/;https://server.iad.liveperson.net/hc/88956865/;g'
That is, using ; instead of / as the delimiter, so you don't have to escape the / every time using \.

Had to run the command logged in as root because sed -i creates temporary files in /tmp and needed write access.
Thanks:Used jim's syntax with the semicolons which worked fine. ooga, I did not have to escape the literal periods.

Related

How to replace text strings (by bulk) after getting the results by using grep

One of my Linux MySQL servers suffered from a crash. So I put back a backup, however this time the MySQL is running local (localhost) instead of remotely (IP-address).
Thanks to Stack Overflow users I found an excellent command to find the IP-address in all .php files in a given directory! The command I am using for this is:
grep -r -l --include="*.php" "100.110.120.130" .
This outputs the necessary files with its location ofcourse. If it were less than 10 results, I would simply change them by hand obviously. However I received over 200 hits/results.
So now I want to know if there is a safe command which replaces the IP-address (example: 100.110.120.130) with the text "localhost" instead for all .php files in the given directory (/var/www/vhosts/) recursively.
And maybe, if only possible and not to much work, also output the changed lines to a file? I don't know if thats even possible.
Maybe someone can provide me with a working solution? To be honest, I dont dare to fool around out of the blue with this. Thats why I created a new thread.
The most standard way of replacing a string in multiple files would be to use a tool such as sed. The list of files you've obtained via grep could be read line by line (when output to a file) using a while loop in combination with sed.
$ grep -r -l --include="*.php" "100.110.120.130" . > list.txt
# this will output all matching files to list.txt
Replacing IP in matched files:
while read -r line ; do echo "$line" >> updated.txt ; sed -i 's/100.110.120.130/localhost/g' "${line}" ; done<list.txt
This will take list.txt and read it line by line to the sed command which should replace all occurrences of the IP to "localhost". The echo command directly before sed outputs all the filenames that will be modified into a file updated.txt (it isn't necessary though as list.txt contains the same exact filenames, although it could be used as a means of verification perhaps).
To do a dry run before modifying all of the matched files remove the
-i from the sed command and it will print the output to stdout
instead of in-place modifying the files.

Replace spaces in all files in a directory with underscores

I have found some similar questions here but not this specific one and I do not want to break all my files. I have a list of files and I simply need to replace all spaces with underscores. I know this is a sed command but I am not sure how to generically apply this to every file.
I do not want to rename the files, just modify them in place.
Edit: To clarify, just in case it's not clear, I only want to replace whitespace within the files, file names should not be changed.
find . -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/ /_/g' {} \;
find grabs all items in the directory (and subdirectories) that are files, and passes those filenames as arguments to the sed command using the {} \; notation. The sed command it appears you already understand.
if you only want to search the current directory, and ignore subdirectories, you can use
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/ /_/g' {} \;
This is a 2 part problem. Step 1 is providing the proper sed command, 2 is providing the proper command to replace all files in a given directory.
Substitution in sed commands follows the form s/ItemToReplace/ItemToReplaceWith/pattern, where s stands for the substitution and pattern stands for how the operation should take place. According to this super user post, in order to match whitespace characters you must use either \s or [[:space:]] in your sed command. The difference being the later is for POSIX compliance. Lastly you need to specify a global operation which is simply /g at the end. This simply replaces all spaces in a file with underscores.
Substitution in sed commands follows the form s/ItemToReplace/ItemToReplaceWith/pattern, where s stands for the substitution and pattern stands for how the operation should take place. According to this super user post, in order to match whitespace characters you must use either just a space in your sed command, \s, or [[:space:]]. The difference being the last 2 are for whitespace catching (tabs and spaces), with the last needed for POSIX compliance. Lastly you need to specify a global operation which is simply /g at the end.
Therefore, your sed command is
sed s/ /_/g FileNameHere
However this only accomplishes half of your task. You also need to be able to do this for every file within a directory. Unfortunately, wildcards won't save us in the sed command, as * > * would be ambiguous. Your only solution is to iterate through each file and overwrite them individually. For loops by default should come equipped with file iteration syntax, and when used with wildcards expands out to all files in a directory. However sed's used in this manner appear to completely lose output when redirecting to a file. To correct this, you must specify sed with the -i flag so it will edit its files. Whatever item you pass after the -i flag will be used to create a backup of the old files. If no extension is passed (-i '' for instance), no backup will be created.
Therefore the final command should simply be
for i in *;do sed -i '' 's/ /_/g' $i;done
Which looks for all files in your current directory and echos the sed output to all files (Directories do get listed but no action occurs with them).
Well... since I was trying to get something running I found a method that worked for me:
for file in `ls`; do sed -i 's/ /_/g' $file; done

Deleting all lines if pattern matches in sed linux mint 17

I am quite new to shell scripting.
I am scraping a website and the scraped text contains a lot of repetitions. Usually they are the menus on a forum, for example. Mostly, I do this in Python, but I thought that sed command will save me reading and printing the input, loops etc. I want to delete thousands of repeated lines from the same single file. I do not want to copy it to another file, because I will end up with 100 new files. The following is a shadow script which I run from the bash shell.
#!/bin/sed -f
sed -i '/^how$/d' input_file.txt
sed -i '/^is test$/d' input_file.txt
sed -i '/^repeated text/d' input_file.txt
This is the content of the input file:
how to do this task
why it is not working
this is test
Stackoverflow is a very helpful community of programmers
that is test
this is text
repeated text is common
this is repeated text of the above line
Then I run in the shell the following command:
sed -f scriptFile input_file.txt
I get the following error
sed: scriptFile line 2: untermindated `s' command
How can I correct the script, and what is the correct syntax of the command I should use to get it work?
Any help is highly appreciated.
assuming you know what your script is doing, it's very easy to put them into a script. in your case, the script should be:
/^how$/d
/^is test$/d
/^repeated text/d
that's good enough.
to make the script alone to be executable is easy too:
#!/usr/bin/env sed -f
/^how$/d
/^is test$/d
/^repeated text/d
then
chmod +x your_sed_script
./your_sed_script <old >new
here is a very good and compact tutorial. you can learn a lot from it.
following is an example from the site, just in case the link is dead:
If you have a large number of sed commands, you can put them into a file and use
sed -f sedscript <old >new
where sedscript could look like this:
# sed comment - This script changes lower case vowels to upper case
s/a/A/g
s/e/E/g
s/i/I/g
s/o/O/g
s/u/U/g
Wouldn't it be easier to do it with egrep followed by a mv, for example
egrep -v 'pattern1|pattern2|pattern3|...' <input_file.txt >tmpfile.txt
mv tmpfile.txt input_file.txt
Each pattern would describe the lines being deleted, much like in sed. You would not end up with additional files, because the mv removes them.
If you have so many pattern, that you don't want to specify them directly on the command line, you can store them in a file use the -f option of egrep.

How to remove multiple lines in multiple files on Linux using bash

I am trying to remove 2 lines from all my Javascript files on my Linux shared hosting. I wanted to do this without writing a script as I know this should be possible with sed. My current attempt looks like this:
find . -name "*.js" | xargs sed -i ";var
O0l='=sTKpUG"
The second line is actually longer than this but is malicious code so I have not included it here. As you guessed my server has been hacked so I need to clean up all these JavaScript files.
I forgot to mention that the output I am getting at the moment is:
sed: -e expression #1, char 4: expected newer version of sed
The 2 lines are just as follows consecutively:
;var
O0l='=sTKpUG
except that the second line is longer, but the rest of the second line should not influence the command.
He meant removing two adjacent lines.
you can do something like this, remember to backup your files.
find . -name "*.js" | xargs sed -i -e "/^;var/N;/^;var\nO0l='=sTKpUG/d"
Since sed processes input file line by line, it does not store the newline '\n' character in its buffer, so we need to tell it by using flag /N to append the next line, with newline character.
/^;var/N;
Then we do our pattern searching and deleting.
/^;var\nO0l='=sTKpUG/d
It really isn't clear yet what the two lines look like, and it isn't clear if they are adjacent to each other in the JavaScript, so we'll assume not. However, the answer is likely to be:
find . -name "*.js" |
xargs sed -i -e '/^distinctive-pattern1$/d' -e '/^alternative-pattern-2a$/d'
There are other ways of writing the sed script using a single command string; I prefer to use separate arguments for separate operations (it makes the script clearer).
Clearly, if you need to keep some of the information on one of the lines, you can use a search pattern adjusted as appropriate, and then do a substitute s/short-pattern// instead of d to remove the short section that must be removed. Similarly with the long line if that's relevant.

sed code to match http://www.domain.com/ and replace with just a / in all files in a directory

I've been searching for this answer for three hours now and I still can't get anything to work. When I run things like this:
sed -i 's/http\:\/\/www\.domain\.org\//\//g checkout_*.php
It drops me into another command line (sorry, I'm very new to sed).
I just want to cd to a dir, grep the dir to see if the string is there then run a replace so I can change my paths from absolute to relative.
You need to close your '. You can also make your command cleaner by using a different sed delimiter to / so that you don't have to escape all those forward slashes in your URL. For example, you can use !, as shown below:
sed -i 's!http://www\.domain\.org/!/!g' checkout_*.php
You just appear to be missing the closing '
sed -i 's/http\:\/\/www\.domain\.org\//\//g' checkout_*.php
Should do what you want ok. But I'd warn you against doing the -i switch without first doing a dry run.

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