goreplace

Go Replace

Go Replace (gr) is a simple utility which can be used as replacement for grep + sed combination in one of most popular cases - find files, which contain something, possibly replace this with something else. Main points:

• Reads .hgignore/.gitignore to skip files
• Skips binaries
• Familiar PCRE-like regexp syntax
• Can perform replacements
• Fast

Bonus:

• Can search in file names (i.e. a simple alternative to find)

Why

Why do thing which is done by grep, find, and sed? Well, for one - I grew tired of typing long commands with pipes and ugly syntax. You want to search? Use grep. Replace? Use find and sed! Different syntax, context switching, etc. Switching from searching to replacing with gr is 'up one item in history and add a replacement string', much simpler!

Besides, it's also faster than grep! Hard to believe, and it's a bit of cheating - but gr by default ignores everything you have in your .hgignore and .gitignore files, skipping binary builds and compiled byte-codes (which you usually don't want to touch anyway).

This is my reason to use it - less latency doing task I'm doing often.

Installation

Binary builds:

It's suited to be installed via go tool, so you can do usual thing:

go get github.com/piranha/goreplace

And you should be done. You have to have $GOPATH set for this to work (go will put sources and generated binary there). Add -u flag there to update your gr.

I prefer name gr to goreplace, so I link gr somewhere in my path (usually in ~/bin) to $GOPATH/bin/goreplace. NOTE: if you use oh-my-zsh, it aliases gr to git remote, so you either should use another name (I propose gor) or remove gr alias:

mkdir -p ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom && echo "unalias gr" >> ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/goreplace.zsh

Usage

Usage is pretty simple, you can just run gr to see help on options. Basically you just supply a regexp (or a simple string - it's a regexp always as well) as an argument and gr will search for it in all files starting from the current directory, just like this:

gr somestring

Some directories and files can be ignored by default (gr is looking for your .hgignore/.gitignore in parent directories), just run gr without any arguments to see help message - it contains information about them.

And to replace:

gr somestring -r replacement.

It's performed in place and no backups are made (not that you need them, right? You're using version control, aren't you?). Unfortunately only plain strings are supported as replacement, no regexp submatch support yet (planned, though).

Changelog

• 1.8
  • Fix .* handling in .gitignore (it actually matched . and ignored absolutely everything)
• 1.7
  • Remove false error reporting about not being able to replace. I'm sorry for messing this up
• 1.6
  • Add option to not colorize output
  • Remove false error reporting about parsing .gitmodules
• 1.5
  • Fix deadlock when stumbling around a pile of unreadable files (a lot of symlinks pointing nowhere, for example)
• 1.4
  • Fix skipping big files when searching only in file names
• 1.3
  • Fix stack trace dump on Linux when file is not readable
• 1.2
  • .gitignore fixes will never end it seems, another one
• 1.1
  • Another .gitignore improvement
• 1.0
  • Option -f/--find-files - search for files by their names
  • .gitignore support improved
• 0.5.2
  • -r now can accept empty string
• 0.5.1
  • Fixed display bug when searching for obscure regexp
• 0.5.0
  • -o/--only option - include only files specified (thanks to Vignesh Sarma)
  • Fixed support of recursive * in .gitignore
• 0.4.3
  • Make ignorers cross-platform (fixed them for windows)
• 0.4.2
  • Cleanup error reporting
• 0.4.1
  • Hide non-fatal errors by default
• 0.4.0
  • Option for plain-text searching