Search and replace text in multiple files.

I had a bunch of html files where a particular style sheet inclusion had to be removed from about 500 odd html files.

Knew this could be done through an sed script , but found a better one using perl from here.

export OLD_TEXT=’<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”style.css”>’

export NEW_TEXT=’some new text’

and use it in the perl command as follows.

perl -w -i -p -e “s/$OLD_TEXT/$NEW_TEXT/g” *.html

or use it against all .html files from the current directory using find and xargs

find . -name “*.html” | xargs -i perl -w -i -p -e “s/$OLD_TEXT/$NEW_TEXT/g” {}