How to replace a multi line string in a bunch files

Question

#!/bin/sh
old="hello"
new="world"
sed -i s/"${old}"/"${new}"/g $(grep "${old}" -rl *)

The preceding script just work for single line text, how can I write a script can replace a multi line text.

old='line1
line2
line3'

new='newtext1
newtext2'

What command can I use.

possible duplicate of [sed and awk: how to replace a section of file to another content?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4311915/sed-and-awk-how-to-replace-a-section-of-file-to-another-content) — parvus, Oct 17 '13 at 05:38

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

1

awk can do that for you.

awk 'BEGIN { RS="" }
  FILENAME==ARGV[1] { s=$0 }
  FILENAME==ARGV[2] { r=$0 }
  FILENAME==ARGV[3] { sub(s,r) ; print }
' FILE_WITH_CONTENTS_OF_OLD FILE_WITH_CONTENTS_OF_NEW ORIGINALFILE > NEWFILE

But you can do it with vim like described here (scriptable solution).

Also see this and this in the sed faq.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

Community

1
1

answered Feb 10 '12 at 12:30

Zsolt Botykai

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 10 '12 at 12:34

You could use perl or awk, and change the record separator to something else than newline (so you can match against bigger chunks. For example with awk:

echo -e "one\ntwo\nthree" | awk 'BEGIN{RS="\n\n"} sub(/two\nthree\n, "foo")'

or with perl (-00 == paragraph buffered mode)

echo -e "one\ntwo\nthree" | perl -00 -pne 's/two\nthree/foo/'

I don't know if there's a possibility to have no record separator at all (with perl, you could read the whole file first, but then again that's not nice with regards to memory usage)

How to replace a multi line string in a bunch files

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