perly pie

Thats right, perl "-p -i -e"!

This command is your friend for replacing strings in a batch of documents at once. As I am not a frequent perl user I tend to forget the order syntax for specifying search/replace, but know the rough format contains a "/s" a "/" and a "/g". I tend to try out a quick command line version trial with stdin before going to the full replace. Today I did the test with

perl -p -i -e 's/goodbye/hello/g'

As it worked first try, I then accidentally used the above command in my "find" expression to do my desired replace (e.g., "find ./ perl -p -i -e 's/hello/goodbye/g' {} \;" ). I totally wasn't thinking, as I really wanted to replace occurences of an old host name in the ".svn/entries" files with a new one. Unfortunately, there were actually occurrences of hello in some binary files (I guess I had blender files with objects called hello). Blender then opened these screwed up files without error but containing no objects (the change in length must have 'effed the offsets in the binary). Luckily these were the only files affected and it was easy enough to change. In the future I'll have to make sure to replace the above command with the appropriate search/replace string and a "-name" to find.

OOps.