Find and Replace in a Large File

Question

I want to find a piece of text in a large xml file and want to replace with some other text. The size of the file is around ( 50GB). I want to do this in command line. I am look

Answer 1

I had a similar need (and similar lack of powershell experience) but cobbled together a complete answer from the other answers on this page plus a bit more research.

I also wanted to avoid the regex processing, since I didn't need it either -- just a simple string replace -- but on a large file, so I didn't want it loaded into memory.

Here's the command I used (adding linebreaks for readability):

Get-Content sourcefile.txt
    | Foreach-Object {$_.Replace('http://example.com', 'http://another.example.com')}
    | Set-Content result.txt

Worked perfectly! Never sucked up much memory (it very obviously didn't load the whole file into memory), and just chugged along for a few minutes then finished.