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
^	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 stdout (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, file1 and file2:

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

Options

replace supports the following options:

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.

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