lrexrepl

Commandline tool for Search & Replace in multiple files using Regular Expressions and Lua scripting language.

This package is also available via LuaRocks, see https://luarocks.org/modules/osch/lrexrepl.

See below for full documentation .

Requirements

Examples

Remove tabs and spaces at end of lines in all files and subdirectories of the current directory:

lrexrepl  -p '[ \t]*$' -r '' -R .

Replace all Hello ... with Hello ...! in the given files:

lrexrepl  -p '(Hello +\w+)' -r '%1!' file1 file2

Replace all DOS line endings with UNIX line endings in all txt files found by the find command:

find -name "*.txt" | lrexrepl  -p '\r\n' -r '\n'

Add 100 to all numbers in the given files:

lrexrepl  -p '\d+' -l 'tonumber(m[0])+100' file1 file2

Count the number of lines in all files and subdirectories of the current directory:

lrexrepl  -p '^.*$' -b 'c=0' -l 'c=c+1' -e 'printf("count=%d\n",c)' -R .

Count the number of newline characters in all files and subdirectories of the current directory:

lrexrepl  -p '\n' -b 'c=0' -l 'c=c+1' -e 'printf("count=%d\n",c)' -R .

Lua script arguments can also be given as *.lua files:

echo "c=0" > foo.lua
lrexrepl  -p '\n' -b 'foo.lua' -l 'c=c+1' -e 'printf("count=%d\n",c)' -R .

Invocation

USAGE:
    lrexrepl [OPTIONS] -p <pat> (-r|-l) <repl> [-] [--] [<file1> ...]

    Searches all given files and replaces all pattern matches by using a
    replace pattern or invoking a given lua script. 

    Options and parameters can appear in any order in the argument list before 
    the first '--'. Every argument after '--' is considered as file name.
    
    If '--' is not specified and no files are given on the commandline, 
    input file names are read line by line from stdin.
    
    If '-' is specified input data from stdin is processed instead of file 
    content. In this case the processed data is written to stdout.
    
    Lua scripts can be given directly on the commandline as arguments for -l, 
    -b, -e, -f, -a. If one of these script arguments ends with '.lua' it is
    interpreted as file name containing the lua script to be called.

PARAMETERS:
    -p <pat>  - search pattern: is a regular expression pattern in PCRE
                syntax.

    -r <repl> - replace pattern: may contain placholder %0 for referencing the
                matched string, %n for the n-th matched group, n = 1...9.

    -l <repl> - lua script called for each match: The script may return 
                the substituted string, or nil if no substitution should be 
                performed for this match. 
                The following variables are given: 'm' contains a table with 
                all subpatterns m[0], m[1], ... (named subpatterns are also 
                supported), variable 'f' contains current file name,
                variable 'startPos' contains start position of the match, 
                variable 'endPos' contains end position of the match.
OPTIONS:
    Single letter options without arguments can be combined, e.g. -Ri is 
    equivalent to -R -i.
    
    -i        - ignore case

    -M        - disable multi line matching, i.e. '^' matches begin of file and
                '$' end of file. Without this option '^' matches begin of line 
                and '$' end of line.

    -s        - dot matches all, i.e. also newlines.
    
    -R        - recurse directories (ignores hidden files, i.e. file names 
                starting with a dot character)

    -b <lua>  - lua script to be called at begin of processing
                before any file is processed.

    -e <lua>  - lua script to be called at the end of processing
                after all files have been processed.
    
    -f <lua>  - lua script to be called for each file before the
                file is being processed.

    -a <lua>  - lua script to be called for each file after the
                file has been processed.
    
    -v        - print verbose output
    -d        - print debug output
    
    -h, --help  print usage
    --version   print version

Extensions

All scripts given as commandline parameter (using option -l, -b, -e, -f, -a) can invoke user supplied functions or use packages without the need for invoking require. For this the package has to be supplied as subpackage of lrexrepl-extension.

Example

Take for example the following Lua file lrexrepl-extension/foo.lua for defining a extension function foo():

return function(x)
    return tonumber(x) + 100
end

Place this file somewhere in the Lua path such it could be required with require("lrexrepl-extension.foo").

Then you may simply invoke foo() in a lrexrepl command parameter script, e.g. use the following commandline to add 100 to all numbers in the given files:

lrexrepl  -p '\d+' -l 'foo(m[0])' file1 file2

User supplied extensions lrexrepl-extension/?.lua have precedence over Lua standard globals or over functions preloaded by lrexrepl. The following functions are preloaded by lrexrepl:

printf() = print(string.format(...))
format() = string.format(...)
upper() = string.upper(...)
lower() = string.lower(...)
capitalize() makes first character of argument uppercase
uncapitalize() makes first character of argument lowercase

End of document.