the stupid search and replacer
Download the appropriate binary for your OS and architecture
and unzip it to somewhere in your $PATH.
Pass a search pattern and a replacement string to replace text matching the former with the latter.
$ git substitute foo bar # "foo" -> "bar"Pass one or more paths to restrict the substitution to just those paths.
$ git substitute Command Demand bin doc # "Command" -> "Demand", but only in bin/ and doc/Wrap quotes around arguments with spaces or other shell metacharacters in them.
$ git substitute 'to boldy go' 'to go boldly'The search pattern argument is an extended regex, interpreting metacharacters
(\^$.|?*()[]{}), while the replacement argument treats them literally.
$ git substitute peoples? persons? # "people" & "peoples" -> "persons?"
Thus, to search for those characters as literals, escape them with a backslash and wrap quotes around the argument (technically you don't have to always do that second bit, but the alternative is even more backslashes, and ugh to that).
$ git substitute '50\.00' 49.99 # '50.00' -> '49.99'The replacement argument recognizes one kind of metacharacter: group
references, in the form \1, \2, etc.
git substitute '\bUser\.find_by_name\((.*)\)' 'User.where(name: \1).first'Finally, before you dive in, may I recommend an alias to git sub? It's much less typing.
git config --global alias.sub substituteI would have just named the command sub, but:
- The other git commands are all complete English words.
- SEO.
Things which this command does not yet do:
- Detect and respect your grep.patternType configuration
- Perl-Compatible Regexes
I can't remember when I first read jason meredith's blog post explaining the "grep -l pipe xargs sed -i s" method, but I remember many times since then when it's enabled me to trivially accomplish enormous things. Thanks, Jason. You've given me leverage.