oddmu-replace(1)

Name

oddmu-replace - replace text in Oddmu pages

Synopsis

• *oddmu replace** [-confirm] [-regexp] *term* *replacement*

Description

The "replace" subcommand does a search and replace on all the Markdown files in the current directory and its subdirectories.

Options

• *-confirm** By default, the replacement doesn't save the changes made. Instead, a unified diff is produced and printed. Given this option, the changed Markdown files are saved to disk.

• *-regexp** By default, the term to be replaced is just a string. With this flag, the term is a regular expression and the replacement can contain backreferences ($1, $2, $3, etc.) to capture groups.

Examples

Replace "Oddmu" in the Markdown files of the current directory:

oddmu replace Oddmu Oddµ

Result:

--- README.md~
+++ README.md

(diff omitted)

1 file would be changed.
This is a dry run. Use -confirm to make it happen.

Notes

This is the equivalent of using *sed*(1) with the --quiet, --regexp-extended, --in-place=~ and --expression command with the s command "s/regexp/replacement/g" except that it prints a unified diff per default instead of making any changes and the regexp rules differ slightly.

The search is case-sensitive. To make it case-insensitive, search for a regular expression that sets the case-insensitive flag, e.g. "(?i)oddmu".

Security

Consider creating a backup before doing replacements!

The following Bash script creates a copy of the current directory using hard links. If you're in a directory called "wiki", it creates a sibling directory called "wiki-2023-11-24" (using the current date) full of links. This takes little space and time. It works as a backup as long as you don't use an application that edits files in place. Most programs overwrite old files by creating new files with the same name, so you should be safe.

#!/usr/bin/bash
d=$(basename $(pwd))
t=$(date --iso-8601)
echo Creating a snapshot of $d in ../$d-$t
rsync --link-dest "../$d" --archive . "../$d-$t/"

The above wouldn't work for database files, for example. There, the database changes the file in place thus the file is changed in the backup directory as well. For Oddmu and the usual text editors, it works. If you use Emacs, don't set *backup-by-copying*, *backup-by-copying-when-linked* and related variables.

See also

oddmu(1), oddmu-search(7)

oddmu(1)

oddmu-search(7)

Authors

Maintained by Alex Schroeder alex@gnu.org.

alex@gnu.org