On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 11:46:30AM -0600, mjn wrote:
> I am looking to walk a directory structure, look at all the files ending
> in .html, and examine them for a bit of text and replace that text if its
> found.
> 
> Awhile ago someone was kind enough to answer me for doing something like
> this if all of the files are in a certain directory but I haven't found a
> way to do this recursively.
> 
> I tried this:
> 
> perl -pi.bak -e 's/bob/dick/' testing/.

Try:
find testing/ -name "*.html" -print -exec perl -pi.bak -e 's/bob/dick/' {} \;

find directory -name "*.html"  - finds all files below the given directory
				 with the suffix .html

-print   - print the name of the files found to standard out
-exec    - runs the specified command, where {} is replaced by the filenames
	   that find found.
\; 	 - is piece of syntax whose reason for existing I never understood.

HTH,
Jim

-- 
Jim Crumley                  |
crumley at fields.space.umn.edu |
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