Search and replace hundreds of strings in tens of thousands of files?

Posted by C Johnson on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by C Johnson
Published on 2010-04-21T02:41:02Z Indexed on 2010/04/21 2:43 UTC
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regex

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search-and-replace

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multiple-files

I am looking into changing the file name of hundreds of files in a (C/C++) project that I work on. The problem is our software has tens of thousands of files that including (i.e. #include) these hundreds of files that will get changed. This looks like a maintenance nightmare. If I do this I will be stuck in Ultra-Edit for weeks, rolling hundreds of regex's by hand like so:

^\#include.*["<\\/]stupid_name.*$

with

#include <dir/new_name.h>

Such drudgery would be worse than peeling hundreds of potatoes in a sunken submarine in the antarctic with a spoon. I think it would rather be ideal to put the inputs and outputs into a table like so:

stupid_name.h <-> <dir/new_name.h>
stupid_nameb.h <-> <dir/new_nameb.h>
stupid_namec.h <-> <dir/new_namec.h>

and feed this into a regular expression engine / tool / app / etc...

My Ultimate Question: Is there a tool that will do that?

Bonus Question: Is it multi-threaded?

I looked at quite a few search and replace topics here on this website, and found lots of standard queries that asked a variant of the following question:

standard question: Replace one term in N files.

as opposed to:

my question: Replace N terms in N files.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

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