find and replace a string in a set of xml files using shell commands

Question

I have 1000 files in a directory. I'm on a solaris machine

I want to replace the string " /example/test/temp " t0 " /testing/in/progress/ in all the xml files in my directory.

any pointers will be great.

thanks,

novice

Answer 1

How about (all on one line):

find . \( -type d ! -name . -prune \) -o \( -type f -name "*.xml" -print \) |
    xargs perl -i.old -p -e 's-/example/test/temp-/testing/in/progress/-g'

Answer 2

Use sed(1).

In general it is safer to use an xslt processor to massage XML files, but in this particular example, the chances of some "funky" XML representation causing problems is pretty remote ...