FARTing The Easy Way – Find And Replace Text - Mikail's Blog

Have you ever found your self in a situation where you’ve needed to replace text in multiple files quickly and efficiently?

I came across this conundrum on a monthly basis when I needed to change the contents of tens/hundreds of LoadRunner scripts and parameters to point from the name of the preceding month to the name of the current month.

I did a bit of searching online and found this handy little command line utility called FART – Find and Replace Text. Put simply, it searches a file for X string and replaces it with Y.

It is really easy to use and literally takes a few minutes to set-up:

Usage: FART [options] [--] [,...] [find_string] [replace_string]

Options: -h --help Show this help message (ignores other options) -q --quiet Suppress output to stdio / stderr -V --verbose Show more information -r --recursive Process sub-folders recursively -c --count Only show filenames, match counts and totals -i --ignore-case Case insensitive text comparison -v --invert Print lines NOT containing the find string -n --line-number Print line number before each line (1-based) -w --word Match whole word (uses C syntax, like grep) -f --filename Find (and replace) filename instead of contents -B --binary Also search (and replace) in binary files (CAUTION) -C --c-style Allow C-style extended characters (\xFF\0\t\n\r\\ etc.) --cvs Skip cvs dirs; execute "cvs edit" before changing files -a --adapt Adapt the case of replace_string to found string -b --backup Make a backup of each changed file -p --preview Do not change the files but print the changes

Examples:

fart "C:\APRIL2011\Scripts\someFile.txt" oldText newText

This line instructs FART to simply replace the string oldText with newText.

fart -i -r "C:\APRIL2011\Scripts\*.prm" march2011 APRIL2011

This line will instruct FART to recursively (-r) search for any file with the .prm extension in the \Scripts folder. The -i flag tells FART to ignore case-sensitivity when looking for the string.

Download:

You can download the latest version of FART (1.99b) from the author’s homepage or from here

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