Linux command to replace string in LARGE file with another string

Question

I have a huge SQL file that gets executed on the server. The dump is from my machine and in it there are a few settings relating to my machine. So basically, I want every oc

Answer 1

Try sed? Something like:

sed 's/c:\/\/temp/\/\/home\/\/some\/\/blah/' mydump.sql > fixeddump.sql

Escaping all those slashes makes this look horrible though, here's a simpler example which changes foo to bar.

sed 's/foo/bar/' mydump.sql > fixeddump.sql

As others have noted, you can choose your own delimiter, which would prevent the leaning toothpick syndrome in this case:

sed 's|c://temp\\|home//some//blah|' mydump.sql > fixeddump.sql

The clever thing about sed is that it operating on a stream rather than a file all at once, so you can process huge files using only a modest amount of memory.