Delete recursively lines from files that match a given string

Posted by Timur Asaliev on November 30, 2009 Leave a comment (4) Go to comments

This is just a small snipplet to remind me of how to delete lines recursively that match a string needle

#!/bin/sh grep -rl "needle" . | while read filename do ( echo $filename sed '/needle/d' $filename> $filename.xx mv $filename.xx $filename ) done

Other

4 Comments.

Chris June 3, 2011 at 1:08 pm

That seems like an awful lot of code for what sed does out-of-the-box.

#!/bin/sh
sed /$2/d $1 > $1.xx && mv $1.xx $1

./rdel.sh file_to_process needle
Timur Asaliev June 7, 2011 at 3:04 pm

Thanks, Chris! Your snippet is very sexy
Leonid Mamchenkov June 7, 2011 at 3:47 pm

If you are using a real text editor, you can do it with one command without leaving to shell.

:g/pattern/d

As per this link:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Delete_all_lines_containing_a_pattern
Timur Asaliev June 8, 2011 at 10:42 am

Leonid, the problem was to process many files at the same time. One of the hosting accounts was compromised by a virus on one (or more?) of the client’s computers that appended a malicious JavaScript to all PHP/HTML files

Thanks for the tip though!