perl one liner

[johnfm00]

hi, can anyone tell me why the following line only
creates the .profile.bak, but does not make the changes inside the files ?



find . /backup/johnm -name ".profile" -exec perl -pi.bak -e 's(COBDIR=/opt/lib/cobv4.1.40/cobol/)(COBDIR=/opt/lib/cobv4.2.0/cobol)g' {} \;

 

[mikevh]

I don't have access to a Unix box currently, but the
syntax of your find command looks odd to me. You've
got a . meaning current directory, then a space, then
another directory path. Is it all supposed to be one
path, i.e., "./backup/johnm", meaning "backup/johnm" is
a directory under the current one? (Maybe I'm wrong here.)

I don't see why you're bothering with find at all. If
the directory structure is as I speculated above, you
could just do

perl -pi.bak -e 's(COBDIR=/opt/lib/cobv4.1.40/cobol/)(COBDIR=/opt/lib/cobv4.2.0/cobol)g' ./backup/johnm/*.profile

Your shell will expand ./backup/johnm/*.profile to the list
of all files in ./backup/johnm with the .profile extension.

If it's really 2 directories, you could do

perl -pi.bak -e 's(COBDIR=/opt/lib/cobv4.1.40/cobol/)(COBDIR=/opt/lib/cobv4.2.0/cobol)g' ./*.profile /backup/johnm/*.profile

or just run it twice, once with the file argument ./*.profile and once with /backup/johnm/*.profile

 

[johnfm00]

thanks mike. I should have looked closer and I would have noticed I had an extra / at the end of (COBDIR=/opt/lib/cobv4.1.40/cobol/) that wasn't required.

 

[mikevh]

Glad you found the cause of the problem.

I've looked up find syntax since I last posted and it is
okay with multiple pathnames, assuming that's really what
you intended. I don't think I've ever used it that way.

Still don't see why you'd bother with find, though, as
Perl will do the job without it.