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

Use this tool, which is written in Perl - with quite a lot of bells and whistles - oldie, but goodie:

http://unixgods.org/~tilo/replace_string/

Features:

• do multiple search-replace or query-search-replace operations
• search-replace expressions can be given on the command line or read from a file
• processes multiple input files
• recursively descend into directory and do multiple search/replace operations on all files
• user defined perl expressions are applied to each line of each input file
• optionally run in paragraph mode (for multi-line search/replace)
• interactive mode
• batch mode
• optionally backup files and backup numbering
• preserve modes/owner when run as root
• ignore symbolic links, empty files, write protected files, sockets, named pipes, and directory names
• optionally replace lines only matching / not matching a given regular expression

This script has been used quite extensively over the years with large data sets.