4.8.3 replace — A String-Replacement Utility

The replace utility program changes strings in place in files or on the standard input.

Note

The replace utility is deprecated as of MySQL 5.7.18 and is removed in MySQL 8.0.

Invoke replace in one of the following ways:

replace from to [from to] ... -- file_name [file_name] ...
replace from to [from to] ... < file_name

from represents a string to look for and to represents its replacement. There can be one or more pairs of strings.

Use the -- option to indicate where the string-replacement list ends and the file names begin. In this case, any file named on the command line is modified in place, so you may want to make a copy of the original before converting it. replace prints a message indicating which of the input files it actually modifies.

If the -- option is not given, replace reads the standard input and writes to the standard output.

replace uses a finite state machine to match longer strings first. It can be used to swap strings. For example, the following command swaps a and b in the given files, file1 and file2:

replace a b b a -- file1 file2 ...

replace supports the following options.

• -?, -I

  Display a help message and exit.

• -#debug_options

  Enable debugging.

• -s

  Silent mode. Print less information what the program does.

• -v

  Verbose mode. Print more information about what the program does.

• -V

  Display version information and exit.