I'm trying to automatically replace some Copyright string in files. The string is is following format
"Copyright (C) 2004-2008 by"
but years can differ. I try to find this lines in all files and replace the last year with current.
grep -r ' * Copyright (C) [0-9]\{4\}-[0-9]\{4\} by.' *
Now how can I replace the last group found with 2013? (Want to use from pipe)
grep doesn't do replacements. You can try sed, e.g.:
sed 's/Copyright (C) \([0-9]\{4\}\)-[0-9]\{4\} by/Copyright (C) \1-2013 by/'
or as Kent notes:
sed 's/\(Copyright (C) [0-9]\{4\}\)-[0-9]\{4\} by/\1-2013 by/'
or ssed:
ssed -R 's/(?<=Copyright \(C\) )([0-9]{4})-[0-9]{4}(?= by)/\1-2013/'
\1 could start from Copyright.., to save some typing. also from the question, I feel OP needs -i. anyway nice answer!
-i flag: I'd think that too, but the OP notes: Want to use from pipe. Anyway, -i is now mentioned.
This is what I came up with to answer your question:
sed -i 's/Copyright (C) \([0-9]\{4\}\)-[0-9]\{4\} by/Copyright (C) \1-2013 by/' `find -type f`
I'm using the sed query proposed by @Lev, but acting on the files directly. I included the -i to save the changes to the file. I also included a "find" to the end of the command line, so that sed would look for files recursively.
Please note the different types of quotes used. The first two are simple quotes, but the last two are back quotes, used to make the shell run the "find" command and use its results as parameter to "sed".
