git-substitute

git-substitute

the stupid search and replacer

Installation

Download the appropriate binary for your OS and architecture and unzip it to somewhere in your $PATH.

Alternately, if you've already installed Go, and $GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH, then just:

$ go get github.com/nicknovitski/git-substitute

Usage

Pass a search pattern and a replacement string to replace text matching the former with the latter.

$ git substitute foo bar # "foo" -> "bar"

Pass one or more paths to restrict the substitution to just those paths.

$ git substitute Command Demand bin doc # "Command" -> "Demand", but only in bin/ and doc/

Wrap quotes around arguments with spaces or other shell metacharacters in them.

$ git substitute 'to boldy go' 'to go boldly'

The search pattern argument is an extended regex, interpreting metacharacters (\^$.|?*()[]{}), while the replacement argument treats them literally.

$ git substitute peoples? persons? # "people" & "peoples" -> "persons?"

Thus, to search for those characters as literals, escape them with a backslash and wrap quotes around the argument (technically you don't have to always do that second bit, but the alternative is even more backslashes, and ugh to that).

$ git substitute '50\.00' 49.99 # '50.00' -> '49.99'

The replacement argument recognizes one kind of metacharacter: group references, in the form \1, \2, etc.

git substitute '\bUser\.find_by_name\((.*)\)' 'User.where(name: \1).first'

Finally, before you dive in, may I recommend an alias to git sub? It's much less typing.

git config --global alias.sub substitute

I would have just named the command sub, but:

1. The other git commands are all complete English words.
2. SEO.

Acknowledgments

I can't remember when I first read jason meredith's blog post explaining the "grep -l pipe xargs sed -i s" method, but I remember many times since then when it's enabled me to trivially accomplish enormous things. Thanks, Jason. You've given me leverage.