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Can I bulk fix PHP require/include references?

A pal of mine asks: "Ugh.. I'm facing server-move Hades.. am moving my site dadsrights.org to a hosted solution, and I have dozens and dozens of files with PHP require_once() includes like "/www/dadsrights/XX". They all need to be changed to "/nfs/www/dadsrights.org/XX". Help!!"

Dave's Answer:

Annie, I am sure we can solve this by having you log in to their Unix server and running a simple script. This is, in fact, a perfect job for the Unix stream editor sed, which accepts patterns of the form s/old/new/g to replace all occurrences of "old" with "new". (the trailing 'g' applies it globally, meaning more than once in a single line, if applicable)

But before we do this, it's always smart to back up all the files we're about to tweak. Just in case. :-) To do that, run this command:

$ tar czvf php-file-backup.tgz ./*.php
This will create a new file called "php-file-backup.tgz" that's a compressed 'tar' archive of all the files. If something goes south and things don't work, you can always unpack and restore all the PHP files with tar xzf php-file-backup.tgz).

Now, ready for some shell script programming? Open up an editor (vi, pico, emacs, whatever) with the new name "fixphp.sh", and type in the following:

#!/bin/sh

cd the directory that contains the files you want to fix

for fixme in *php
do
  sed 's|/www/dadsrights/|/nfs/www/dadsrights.org/|g' $fixme > new
  mv new $fixme
  echo fixed $fixme
done

exit 0
That's it. Now, save this out and execute it by feeding it to a subshell:
$ sh fixphp.sh
You will want to make sure that you've specified the correct directory in the script as you've typed it in, of course.

Once you run the script, you should see a list of 'fixed xx, fixed yy' and when it completes, all your PHP include_once() directives should be working fine.

Good luck!


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Reader Comments To Date: 4

Sean said, on November 17, 2004 3:28 AM:

Edit-in-place to the rescue!

perl -i -p -e 's/\/www\/dadsrights\//\/nfs\/www\/dadsrights.org\//g' *.php

Change the -i to -i.bak if you want foo.php to be saved as foo.php.bak before the changes ar emade

Brent Dax said, on November 25, 2004 8:48 AM:

Right idea, but let's try for readability. ;^)

perl -pi~ -e 's{/www/dadsrights/}{/nfs/www/dadsrights.org/}g' *.php

John said, on January 7, 2005 12:36 AM:

How about for a whole directory tree?

Dave Taylor said, on January 7, 2005 1:40 AM:

for a whole directory tree, I'd use the find command probably something like

for fixme in $(find . -type f -name "*.php")

which should match all PHP files in the current directory and all subdirectories too.

Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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