replace(1)

replace1

A string-replacement utility

Usage

replace arguments

Overview

The replace utility program changes strings in place in files or on the standard input.

Invoke replace in one of the following ways:

shell> replace from to [from to] ... -- file_name [file_name] ...
shell> replace from to [from to] ... < file_name

from represents a string to look for and to represents its replacement. There can be one or more pairs of strings.

Use the -- option to indicate where the string-replacement list ends and the file names begin. In this case, any file named on the command line is modified in place, so you may want to make a copy of the original before converting it. replace prints a message indicating which of the input files it actually modifies.

If the -- option is not given, replace reads the standard input and writes to the standard output.

replace uses a finite state machine to match longer strings first. It can be used to swap strings. For example, the following command swaps a and b in the given files, file1 and file2:

shell> replace a b b a -- file1 file2 ...

The replace program is used by msql2mysql. See msql2mysql(1).

replace supports the following options.

• -?, -I

Display a help message and exit.

• -#debug_options

Enable debugging.

• -s

Silent mode. Print less information what the program does.

• -v

Verbose mode. Print more information about what the program does.

• -V

Display version information and exit.

Releases

15 releases since Debian 2.1 (Slink); the text changed 13 times.

  1. 2.1
  2. 2.2
  3. 3.0
  4. 3.1
  5. 4.0
  6. 5.0
  7. 6.0
  8. 7
  9. 8
  10. 9
  11. 10
  12. 11
  13. 12
  14. 13–Arch

-s until Debian 3.1 (Sarge); -v until Debian 3.1 (Sarge).

Author

MariaDB Foundation (http://www.mariadb.org/).

From mariadb 13.0.2-2 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Also shipped by mariadb-lts. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.