Invoking ex commands on a subset of files

17 April, 2012

I use sed a lot for modifications I need to make to a number of files, which is great, but as it happens relatively infrequently I need to remind myself how to do certain things as and when I come across them.

On the other hand, I use vim every day for my general editing, and am making increasingly heavy use of its command syntax to automate some of my editing tasks.  As a result, I am probably more familiar with vim’s command syntax than sed.

Yesterday I had a simple problem to solve: for every file containing string SEARCH, I wanted to delete any line matching LINE.  Here’s a couple of ways you could do it using sed:

grep -Rl "SEARCH" . | while read FILE; do sed -i "" "/LINE/d" $FILE; done
 
grep -Rl "SEARCH" . | while read FILE; do sed "/LINE/d" $FILE > tmp; mv tmp $FILE ; done

The first is non-portable and works with BSD sed; for GNU sed you’d have to remove the “” after the -i.  The second is a little more portable but requires a temporary file.

Just for kicks, though, I thought I’d do it in ex this time.  Here’s how that looks:

grep -Rl "SEARCH" . | while read FILE; do (echo "g/LINE/d"; echo 'wq') | ex -s FILE; done

Admittedly, for a simple task like this it’s probably pointless, but there have been times where I’ve repeated a command in vim over a series of files where this might come in ha

ex, sed, shell, vim