How to remove System.out.println's from codebase

Question

We have a huge (old legacy java) code-base, where many files (around 5k) have System.out.println\'s. We are planning to remove them for cleanup/performance reasons. How can

Answer 1

I wrote a regex in perl that replaces the string "System.out.println" with ";//System.out.println". I believe that there are very few cases where this would break the build. It would just become an "else ;", which is compiled to zero bytecode instructions.

It looks like this is what you've proposed. It worked for me -- except if you have additional statements on the same line. However, that is bad style to begin with (and I knew I didn't do that).