Shell script - search and replace text in multiple files using a list of strings

Question

I have a file \"changesDictionary.txt\" containing (a variable number of) pairs of key-value strings.

e.g.

\"textToSearchFor\" = \"theReplacementText\"

Answer 1

Here are the basic steps I would do

1. Copy the changesDictionary.txt file

2. In it replace "a"="b" to the equivalent sed line: e.g. (use $1 for the file name)

   sed -e 's/a/b/g' $1

   (you could write a script to do this or just do it by hand, if you just need to do this once and it's not too big).

3. If the files are all in one directory, then you can do something like:

   ls *.txt | xargs scriptFromStep2.sh

4. If they are in subdirs, use a find to call that script on all of the files, something like

   find . -name '*.txt' -exec scriptFromStep2.sh {} \;

These aren't exact, do some experiments to make sure you get it right -- it's just the approach I would use.

(but, if you can, just use perl, it would be a lot simpler)