Posts Tagged ‘text string’

Windows “God Mode” one shortcut to see and configure all setttings in Microsoft Windows 7 / 8 / 10 – Windows Master Control Panel hidden feature

Monday, January 25th, 2016

GodMode-secret-master-control-panel-in-windows-operating-system
One very handy "secret" feature of Windows Operating System which is very useful to people who administrate a dozen of Windows servers daily is called "God Mode".
The idea behind "God Mode" is pretty simple it aims to give you maximum control and viability concentrated in one single Window interface.

God Mode was quite a lot ranted over the past years so it is likely that many of my blog readers are already aware of that Windows secret, but for those who didn't it will be
nice to check it out. To see the God Mode Windows functionality just create a New Folder in Windows Desktop or Anywhere on the Windows PC and Rename the New Folder to:
 

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Windows-7-God-mode-screenshot-or-how-to-easily-get-one-point-of-control-in-windows-OS

By creating folder witth his text string you will be able to do almost everything you ever tend to do on Windows from changing the outlook of theme and mouse cursor, changing,
Win explorer's folder's options, modify fonts, change cursor blink rate, get windows performance tools and information, add / remove programs, modify language, modify
firewall settings and in short do everything that is provided by Control Panel + some other goodies like Administrative Tools, Restore Options, Event logs etc. grouped in a fantastic readable manner.
GodMode naming says it all more or less it aims to give you "Godlike" accessibility to the Windows. Of course to be able to properly use the feature you will have to create
the Folder named GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} with Administrator user.
The GodMode is available in Windows OSes since quite a long (2007) and is documented officially by Microsoft

Another alternative shortcut that gives the Godmode Master control panel is:
 

God.{ed7ba470-8e54-465e-825c-99712043e01c}

 

Enjoy 🙂

10 must know and extremely useful Linux commands that every sys admin should know

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

10 must know extremely useful gnu linux command line tools tips and tricks
There are plenty of precious command line stuff every admin should be aware on Linux. In this article I just decided to place some I use often and are interesting to know. Below commands are nothing special and probably many of experienced sys admins already know them. However I'm pretty sure novice admins and start-up Linux enthusiasts will find it useful. I know there much more to be said on the topic. So anyone is mostly welcome to share his used cmds.
 
1. Delete all files in directory except files with certain file extension

It is good trick to delete all files in directory except certain file formats, to do so:

root@linux:~# rm !(*.c|*.py|*.txt|*.mp3)

2. Write command output to multiple files (tee)

The normal way to write to file is by using redirect (to overwrite file) ">" or (to append to file) ">>";. However when you need to write output to multiple files there is a command called tee, i.e.:

root@linux:~# ps axuwwf | tee file1 file2 file3

3. Search for text in plain text file printing number of lines after match

Whether you need to print all number of lines after match of "search_text" use:

root@linux:~# grep -A 5 -i "search_text" text_file.txt

4. Show all files where text string is matched with GREP (Search for text recursively)

Searching for text match is extremely helpful for system administration. I use  grep recursive (capability) almost on daily basis:

root@websrv:/etc/dovecot# grep -rli text *
conf.d/10-auth.conf
conf.d/10-mail.conf
dovecot.conf

-l (instructs to only print file names matching string), -r (stands for recursive search), and -i flag (instructs grep to print all matches  inogoring case-sensitivity ( look for text nomatter if with capital or small letters)

5. Finding files and running command on each file type matched

In Linux with find command it is possible to search for files and run command on each file matched.
Lets say you we want to look in current directory for all files .swp (temporary) files produced so often by VIM and wipe them out:

root@linux:~# find . -iname '*.swp*' -exec rm -f {} \;

6. Convert DOS end of file (EOF) to UNIX with sed

If it happens you not have dos2unix command installed on Linux shell and you need to translate DOS end of file (\r\n – return carriage, new line) to UNIX's (\r – return carriage)), do it with sed:

root@linux:~# sed 's/.$//' filename

7. Remove file duplicate lines with awk:

cat test.txt
test
test
test duplicate
The brown fox jump over ...
Richard Stallman rox

root@linux:~# awk '!($0 in array) { array[$0]; print }' test.txt
test
test duplicate
The brown fox jump over ...
Richard Stallman rox

To remove duplicate text from all files in directory same can be easily scripped with bash for loop:

root@linux:~# for i in *; do
awk '!($0 in array) { array[$0]; print }' $i;
done

8. Print only selected columns from text file

To print text only in 1st and 7th column in plain text file with awk:

root@linux:~# awk '{print $1,$6;}' filename.txt ...

To print only all existing users on Linux with their respective set shell type:

root@linux:~# cat /etc/passwd|sed -e 's#:# #g'|awk '{print $1,$6;}'

9. Open file with VIM text editor starting from line

I use only vim for console text processing, and I often had to edit and fix file which fail to compile on certain line number. Thus use vim to open file for writing from necessary line num. To open file and set cursor to line 35 root@linux:~# vim +35 /home/hipo/current.c

10. Run last command with "!!" bash shorcut

Lets say last command you run is uname -a:

root@websrv:/home/student# uname -a
Linux websrv 3.2.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.2.46-1 i686 GNU/Linux

To re-run it simply type "!!":

root@websrv:/home/student# !!
uname -a
Linux websrv 3.2.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.2.46-1 i686 GNU/Linux

root@websrv:/home/student#

 

Create ASCII Art Text banners in GNU / Linux console and terminal with figlet and toilet

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

Create fun and colorful text ASCII art banner logos on Linux (figlet and toilet)

As an old school hobbyist, I'm a kind of ASCII art freak. Free Software is just great for this text / console maniacs like me, who spend their youth years in a DOS (Disk Opearting System) command prompt.
For long time, I'm researching the cool programs which has to do somehow with ASCII Art, in that relation I decided to write few ones of figlet and toilettwo nice programs capable of generating ASCII art text beautiful banners based on a typed in text string. Obviously toilet developer Sam Hocevar had a great sense of humor 🙂

To play with figlet and toilet install them, according to (rpm or deb based package manager on distro) with yum / apt-get.

yum -y install toilet figlet
....

apt-get --yes install toilet figlet
....

There are no native tool packages for Slackware, so Slackaware Linux users need to compile figlet from source code – available on figlet's home page figlet.org

Once figlet and toilet are installed, here is few sample use cases;
 

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ figlet hello world!             

figlet ascii art banner hello world
 

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ figlet -f script Merrcy Christmas

figlet merry christmas text in ascii art with script font linux

Plenty of figlet font examples are available on Figlet's website example section – very cool stuff btw 🙂 To take a quick look on all fonts available for toilet – ascii art banner creation. Type in your console tty or terminal; for i in $(dpkg -L toilet-fonts|grep -i /usr/share/figlet); do toilet -f $(echo $i|sed -e "s#.tlf##g" -e "s#/usr/share/figlet/##g") test; done

On below picture, I made a screenshot of my gnome terminal with most fonts installed by toilet-fonts (fonts package).

ascii art banner create generate program linux figlet toilet with fonts on debian linux screenshot pic - how to create ascii banners linux

There are about 150 fonts, most of which needs to be downloaded and installed manually. A quick search online led me to a fonts collection of 263 figlet ascii art fonts – you can download a mirror of the file figletfonts40.zip here. To aid up toilet and  with those 263 extra fonts (on Debian) do; wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/figletfonts40.zip cd /usr/share/figlets unzip figletfonts40.zip Note: you have to have installed unzip in advance, unzip is not in default install, so if you don't have it fetch it with; apt-get install --yes unzip toilet and figlet are partially compatible, between each other so most fonts should work okay on both.

figlet supports, also simple formatting of ASCII art banner, here is few examples with formatting; a.) format to center  

$ figlet -c bla bla

figlet centered ascii art text bla bla screenshot

b.) format to left


figlet ascii art banner left formatted text debian gnu linux

c. right formatting


figlet ascii art banner right formatted ascii art text debian linux generator

d. format to terminal width By default text that figlet generates is to suit for 80 rows terminals, normally on higher resolution in gnome-terminal and other Linux environments, terminals are not dimensioned 80×25, thus it is useful for longer sentences text to display text in accordance to terminal size;

figlet ascii art banner sentence phrase to terminal width banner debian gnu linux

The cool thing and advantage of toilet over figlet is toilet can print out ASCII art banners in colors – very very cool stuff; To quickly test all filters issue; for i in $(toilet -F list|awk '{ print $1 }'|grep -v Available|sed -e 's#"##g'); do toilet -F $i pC-fREAK; done Change text pC-fREAK with whatever you like;

> using toilet to create funny ascii-art banners linux pc-freak logo pictures

Very nice use of toilet or figlet, can be if it is placed to produce some nice message in ASCII banner on each user login. Other nice fun applications  is together with cowsay.

apt-cache show cowsay|grep -i description -A 5 Description: A configurable talking cow Cowsay (or cowthink) will turn text into happy ASCII cows, with speech (or thought) balloons. If you don't like cows, ASCII art is available to replace it with some other creatures (Tux, the BSD daemon, dragons, and a plethora of animals, from a turkey to an elephant in a snake).

In case interested in using cowsay on system logins, I suggest you check out my tiny cowrand script which uses cowsay and shows random cow ASCII art picture on each user login.

Also a good use if you're Christian is to combine, some nice Holy Scriptures  verse in text ascii with  some encouraging daily bible phrase from verse or fortune.

Apart from fun, common use of ASCII art slogans is in e-mail or blog comments ASCII art signatures, also they are certainly good for creating unusual (text) advertisements and even can be used to save printer ink:) cause text generated in ASCII art logo is not massive like most text fonts are 🙂 Last but not least  ASCII art banners are useful in generation of ASCII slogans as an art; after all ASCII art is one of innovative arts of 21st century 🙂

Editting binary files in console and GUI on FreeBSD and Linux

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

I’ve recently wanted to edit one binary file because there was compiled in the binary a text string with a word I didn’t liked and therefore I wanted to delete. I know I can dig in the source of the proggie with grep and directly substitute my “unwatned text” there but I wanted to experiment, and see what kind of hex binary text editors are for Free OSes.
All those who lived the DOS OS computer era should certainly remember the DOS hex editors was very enjoyable. It was not rare case, where in this good old days, one could simply use the hex editor to “hack” the game and add extra player lives or modify some vital game parameter like put himself first in the top scores list. I even remember some DOS programs and games was possible to be cracked with a text editor … Well it was times, now back to current situation as a Free Software user for the last 12 years it was interesting to see what is the DOS hexeditor like alternatives for FreeBSD and Linux and hence in this article I will present my findings:

A quick search in FreeBSD ports tree and Debian installable packages list, I’ve found a number of programs allowing one to edit in console and GUI binary files.

Here is a list of the hex editors I will in short review in this article:

  • hexedit
  • dhex
  • chexedit
  • hte
  • hexer
  • hexcurse
  • ghex
  • shed
  • okteta
  • bless
  • lfhex

1. hexedit on Linux and BSD – basic hex editor

I’ve used hexedit already on Linux so I’ve used it some long time ago.

My previou experience in using hexedit is not too pinky, I found it difficult to use on Redhat and Debian Linux back in the day. hexedit is definitely not a choice of people who are not “initiated” with hex editting.
Anyways if you want to give it a try you can install it on FreeBSD with:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/hexedit
freebsd# make install clean

On Debian the hexedit, install package is named the same so installation is with apt:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install hexedit

hexedit screenshot Debian Linux Squeeze

2. Hex editting with chexedit

I’ve installed chexedit the usual way from ports:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/chexedit
freebsd# make install clean

chexedit is using the ncurses text console library, so the interface is very similar to midnight commander (mc) as you see from below’s screenshot:

Chexeditor FreeBSD 7.2 OS Screenshot

Editting the binary compiled in string was an easy task with chexedit as most of the commands are clearly visible, anyways changing a certain text string contained within the binary file with some other is not easy with chexedit as you need to know the corresponding binary binary value representing each text string character.
I’m not a low level programmer, so I don’t know the binary values of each keyboard character and hence my competence came to the point where I can substitute the text string I wanted with some unreadable characters by simply filling all my text string with AA AA AA AA values…

chexedit on Debian is packaged under a deb ncurses-hexedit. Hence to install it on Deb run:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install ncurses-hexedit

Further on the binary to run chexedit on binary contained within ncurses-hexedit is:

debian:~# hexeeditor

3. Hex Editting on BSD and Linux with hte

Just after trying out chexedit, I’ve found about the existence of one even more sophisticated hexeditor console program available across both FreeBSD and Linux.
The program is called hte (sounds to me a bit like the Indian word for Elephant “Hatti” :))

hte is installable on Debian with cmd:

debian:~# apt-get install ht

On FreeBSD the port name is identical, so to install it I execed:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/hte
freebsd# make install clean

hte is started on Debian Linux (and presumably other Linux distros) with:

$ hte

On FreeBSD you need to run it with ht command:

freebsd# ht

You see how hte looks like in below screenshot:

ht has the look & feel like midnight commander and I found it easier to use than chexedit and hexeditor
4. hexer VI like interface for Linux

As I was looking through the available packages ready to install, I’ve tried hexer

debian:~# apt-get install –yes hexer

hexer does follow the same standard commands like VIM, e.g. i for insert, a for append etc.

Hexer Debian Linux vim like binary editor screenshot

It was interesting to find out hexer was written by a Bulgarian fellow Petar Penchev 🙂
(Proud to be Bulgarian)

http://people.freebsd.org/~roam/ – Petar Penchev has his own page on FreeBSD.org

As a vim user I really liked the idea, the only thing I didn’t liked is there is no easy way to just substitute a string within the binary with another string.

5. hexcurse another ncurses library based hex editor

On Deb install and run via:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install hexcurse
debian:~# hexcurse /usr/bin/mc

Hexcurse Debian Linux text binary editor screenshot

hexcurse is also available on FreeBSD to install it use cmd:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/hexcurse
freebsd# make install clean
….

To access the editor functions press CTRL+the first letter of the word in the bottom menu, CTRL+H, CTRL+S etc.
Something I disliked about it is the program search is always in hex, so I cannot look for a text string within the binaries with it.

6. ghex – Editting binary files in graphical environment

If you’re running a graphical environment, take a look at ghex. ghex is a gnome (graphical hex) editor.Installing ghex on Debian is with:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install ghex
….

To run ghex from terminal type:

debian:~# ghex2

GHex2 GNOME hex binary editor screenshot

To install ghex on FreeBSD (and I assume other BSDs), install via port:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/ghex
freebsd# make install clean

Gnome hex editor have plenty of tools, useful for developers to debug binary files.

Some nice tools one can find are under the the menus:

Windows -> Character Table

This will show a complete list of each keyboard sent character in ASCII, Hex, Decimal, Octal and Binary

Screenshot ghex Character table Debian Linux

Another useful embedded tool in ghex is:

Windows -> Type Convertion Dialog

Ghex type convertion dialog screenshot

Note that if you want to use the Type Convertion Dialog tool to find the representing binary values of a text string you will have to type in the letters one by one and save the output within a text file and later you can go and use the same editor to edit the text string within the binary file you like.

I’m not a programmer but surely for programmers or people who want to learn some binary counting, this 2 ghex edmebbed tools are surely valuable.

To conclude even though there are plenty of softwares for hex editting in Linux and BSD, none of them is not so easy to use as the old DOS hexdedit tool, maybe it will be a nice idea if someone actually rewrites the DOS tool and they package it for various free operating systems, I’m sure many people will find it helpful to have a 1:1 equivalent to the DOS tool.

7. Shed pico like interfaced hex editor

For people, who use pico / nano as a default text editor in Linux shed will probably be the editor of choice as it follows the command shortcuts of picoOn Deb based distros to install it run:

debian:~# apt-get install –yes shed

shed pico like hex binary editor Linux

Shed has no BSD port as of time of writting.8. Okteta a KDE GUI hex editor

For KDE users, I found a program called okteta. It is available for Deb based Linuxes as deb to install it:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install okteta

Screenshot Okteta Debian GNU / Linux Squeeze

As of time of writting this article there is no okteta port for BSDs.
Okteta has plenty of functions and even has more of a functions than ghexedit. Something distinctive for it is it supports opening multiple files in tabs.

9. lfhex a large file text editor

lfhex is said to be a large (binary) file text editor, I have not tested it myself but just run it to see how it looks like. I don’t have a need to edit large binary files too, but I guess there are people with such requirements too 🙂

lfhex - Linux The Large file hex editor

To install lfhex on Debian:

debian:~# apt-get install –yes lfhex

lfhex has also a FreeBSD port installable via:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/lfhex
freebsd# make install clean

10. Bless a GUI tool for editting large hex (binary) files

Here is the description directly taken from the BSD port /usr/ports/editors/bless

Bless is a binary (hex) editor, a program that enables you to edit files asa sequence of bytes. It is written in C# and uses the Gtk# bindings for theGTK+ toolkit.

To install and use ot on deb based Linuxes:

debian:~# apt-get install –yes bless
….

On BSD installation is again from port:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/bless
freebsd# make install clean
….

Something that makes bless, maybe more desirable choice for GUI users than ghex is its availability of tabs. Opening multiple binaries in tabs will be useful only to few heavy debuggers.

Bless GUI hex editor Debian Linux tabs opened screenshot

11. Ghextris – an ultra hard hacker tetris game 🙂

For absolute, hacker / (geeks), there is a tetris game called ghextris. The game is the hardest tetris game I ever played in my life. It requires more than regular IQ and a lot of practice if you want to become really good in this game.

To enjoy it:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install ghextris

Ultra hrad hardcore hackers game ghextris screenshot

Unfortunately there is no native port of ghextris for BSD (yet). Anyhow, it can be probably run using the Linux emulation or even compiled from source.
Well that’s all I found for hexedit-ing, I’ll be happy to hear if someone can give me some feedback on his favourite editor.

Tools for finding files containing a string (recursively) in Graphical Enviroments (GNOME, KDE and XFCE) on GNU linux and FreeBSD

Monday, April 9th, 2012

1. Finding files containing a specific string with GNOME GUI tool gnome-search-tool

Default installation of GNOME version 2.x and 3.x is equipped with a tool called gnome-search-tool. The tool is used by default in the GNOME's file explorer program Nautilus. The quickest way to look for a certain text string across all the files located in a directory and show them is with nautilus's – find manager.

Below is a screenshot showing the gnome-search-tool embedded in nautilus Screenshot Search for pass string in GNOME nautilus File browser

Nautilus find uses gnome-search-tool program for its file search. Below is a screenshot showing the gnome-search-tool embedded in nautilus:

The gnome-search-tool can be also invoked through Gnome Run Application with ALT+F2 or directly run from terminal e.g.:

hipo@noah:~$ gnome-search-tool

gnome-search-tool screenshot find files by content recursively Debian GNU / Linux

As you can see in below screenshot, gnome-search-tool has many available filter file search criterias.

gnome-search-tool available options screenshot Debian Linux

You see I wanted to look for my project passwords so typed in pass in Contains the text: field and pressed enter to simply look for this text in all my files in the look in folder RichtooRich
Screenshot 3 files found gnome search tool Linux screenshot

Actually gnome-search-tool offers plenty of more options than one might look for. With it one can easily make a combination of complex search critea (filters) and hence a very versatile Desktop file saerch tool. From testing it I can say it for sure more powerful program than MS Windows default file searching program called Find It – this is the program with the ( "dumb dog holing a magnifier" 🙂

One can use the Add or Remove to Add single or various combination of filter criterias. For the sake of testing it, I've added a number of file search filters as you see in the shot below:

Linux graphical program for recursive file search gnome-search-tool - file search example screenshot

The search critias are not matched and therefore 0 files were found.
In case if you wonder how gnome-search-tool works? It is actually a GUI wrapper to Linux's Linux find command .

I wasn't complete sure if it uses find for the file search, so to check I run a one search and in in console ran:
 

hipo@noah:~$ ps axuwf|grep -i find
hipo 18213 2.0 0.0 25568 1276 ? S 23:55 0:00 find /home/hipo/Richtoorich ( -iname * -o -iname .* ) ! -type p -exec grep -i -I -c test {} ; -mtime -1 ( -size 102400 -o -size +102400 ) -user root ! -iname *bad\-name\-to\-omit* -print

You can see the filters set in gnome-search-tool are passed as command arguments to find.

2. Finding files containing a string recursively in KDE with kfind

For KDE users there is a handy little tool called Kfind. Kfind is less "search customizable" if it is compared to gnome-search-tool but it has advantage that its search options are way more "user friendly" / human readable 🙂

To use the tool to look in all files for explicit string fill in Look in: or browse to set the main directory where it will look for the string.

Screenshot find content in multiple files and folders recursively kfind kde programThen in the second Contents (tab) fill in the Containing Text: with the string to be looked for:

Kfind Recursive file search tool for Linux KDE graphic environment, input text field screenshot

Finally in the Names/Location tab, there are two other helpful search options – Show Hidden Files and Case Sensitive Search

Screenshot find content in multiple files and folders recursively kfind kde gui program

I'll be curious to hear if someone knows some other nice software easy and comprehensive to use for Linux / BSD. If you know a better file searcher for Linux than this kfind or gnome-search-tool please drop a comment.

Using perl and sed to substitute strings in multiple files on Linux and BSD

Friday, August 26th, 2011

Using perl and sed to replace strings in files on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and other UnixOn many occasions when had to administer on Linux, BSD, SunOS or any other *nix, there is a need to substitute strings inside files or group of files containing a certain string with another one.

The task is not too complex and many of the senior sysadmins out there would certainly already has faced this requirement and probably had a good idea on files substitution with perl and sed, however I’m quite sure there are dozen of system administrators out there who did not know, how and still haven’t faced a situation where there i a requirement to substitute from a command shell or via a scripting language.

This article tagets exactly these system administrators who are not 100% sys op Gurus 😉

1. Substitute text strings inside files on Linux and BSD with perl

Perl programming language has originally been created to do a lot of text manipulation as well as most of the Linux / Unix based hosts today have installed working copy of perl , therefore using perl as a mean to substitute one string in a file to another one is maybe the best way to completet the task.
Another good thing about perl is that text processing with it is said to be in most cases a bit faster than sed .
However it is still dependent on the string to be substituted I haven’t done benchmark tests to positively say 100% that always perl is quicker, however my common sense suggests perl will be quicker.

Now enough talk here is a very simple way to substitute a reoccuring, text string inside a file with another chosen one is like so:

debian:~# perl -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g' file1 file2

This will substitute the string foo with bar everywhere it’s matched in file1 and file2

However the above code is a bit “dangerous” as it does not preserve a backup copy of the original files, where string is substituted is not made.
Therefore using the above command should only be used where one is 100% sure about the string changes to be made.

Hence a better idea whether conducting the text substitution is to keep also the original file backup under a let’s say .bak extension. To achieve that I use perl as follows:

freebsd# perl -i.bak -p -e 's/syzdarma/magdanoz/g;' file1 file2

This command creates copies of the original files file1 and file2 under the names file1.bak and file2.bak , the files file1 and file2 text occurance of strings syzdarma will get substituted with magdanoz using the option /g which means – (substitute globally).

2. Substitute string in all files inside directory using perl on Linux and BSD

Every now and then the there is a need to do manipulations with large amounts of files, I can’t right now remember a good scenario where I had to change all occuring matching strings to anther one to all files located inside a directory, anyhow I’ve done this on a number of occasions.

A good way to do a mass file string substitution on Linux and BSD hosts equipped with a bash shell is via the commands:

debian:/root/textfiles:# for i in $(echo *.txt); do perl -i.bak -p -e 's/old_string/new_string/g;' $i; done

Where the text files had the default txt file extension .txt

Above bash loop prints each of the files located in /root/textfiles and substitutes everywhere (globally) the old_string with new_string .

Another alternative to the above example to replace multiple occuring text string in all files in multiple directories is possible using a combination of shell commands grep, perl, sort, uniq and xargs .
Let’s say that one wants to match everywhere inside the root directory and all the descendant directories for files with a custom string and substitute it to another one, this can be done with the cmd:

debian:~# grep -R -files-with-matches 'old_string' / | sort | uniq | xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/old_string/new_string/g'

This command will lookup for string old_string in all files in the / – root directory and in case of occurance will substitute with new_string (This command’s idea was borrowed as an idea from http://linuxadmin.org so thx.).

Using the combination of 5 commands, however is not very wise in terms of efficiency.

Therefore to save some system resources, its better in terms of efficiency to take advantage of the find command in combination with xargs , here is how:

debian:~# find / | xargs grep 'old_string' -sl |uniq | xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/old_string/new_string/g'

Once again the find command example will do exactly the same as the substitute method with grep -R …

As enough is said about the way to substitute text strings inside files using perl, I will further explain how text strings can be substituted using sed

The main reason why using sed could be a better choice in some cases is that Unices are not equipped by default with perl interpreter. In general the amount of servers who contains installed sed compared to the ones with perl language interpreter is surely higher.

3. Substitute text strings inside files on Linux and BSD with sed stream editor

In many occasions, wether a website is hosted, one needs to quickly conduct a change in string inside all files located in a directory, to resolve issues with static urls directly encoded in html.
To achieve this task here is a code using two little bash script loops in conjunctions with sed, echo and mv commands:

debian:/var/www/website# for i in $(ls -1); do cat $i |sed -e "s#index.htm#http://www.webdomain.com/#g">$i.new; done
debian:/var/www/website# for i in $(ls *.new); do mv $i $(echo $i |sed -e "s#.new##g"); done

The above command sed -e “s#index.htm#http://www.webdomain.com/#g”, instructs sed to substitute all appearance of the text string index.htm to the new text string http://www.webdomain.com

First for bash loop, creates all the files with substituted string to file1.new, file2.new, file3.new etc.
The second for loop uses mv to overwrite the original input files file1, file2, file3, etc. with the newly created ones file1.new, file2.new, file3.new

There is a a way shorter way to conclude the same text substitutions task using a simpler one liner with only using sed and bash’s eval capabilities, here is how:

debian:/var/www/website# sed -i 's/old_string/new_string/g' *

Above command will change old_string to new_string inside all files in directory /var/www/website

Whether a change has to be made with less than 1024 files using this method might be more efficient, however whether a text substitute has to be done to let’s say 5000+ the above simplistic version will not work. An error of Argument list too long will prevent the sed -i ‘s/old_string/new_string/g’ to complete its task.

The above for loop 2 liner should be also working without problems with FreeBSD and the rest of BSD derivatives, though I have not tested it yet, hence any feedback from FreeBSD guys is mostly welcome.

Consider that in order to have the for loops commands work on FreeBSD or NetBSD, they have to be run under a bash shell.
That’s all folks thanks the Lord for letting me write this nice article, I hope it gives some insights on how multiple files text replace on Unix works .
Cheers 😉