As an Oracle DBA you will come across many situations where you need to replace string text within OS layer files. This procedure covers the use of Perl command to perform such a task. This procedure will work in both UNIX and LINUX.

1. Logon to you Oracle server as the owner of the files you wish to perform a string replacement on.

2. We will use the command (“perl -pi -e ‘s/{old_string}/{new_string}/g’ {file_name}”) to perform our string replacement.

3. In this example we will replace all of the references to the string “MARS” with the string “EARTH” in any file that ends in test*sh, the command will appear as:

perl -pi -e ‘s/MARS/EARTH/g’ test*sh

4. List all of the contents of files of the format test*sh with the cat command.

mylinux:>cat test*sh
MARS
MARS
MARS
MARS
mylinux:>

5. Execute your perl command in the same directory where your the files are located.

mylinux:>perl -pi -e ‘s/MARS/EARTH/g’ test*sh mylinux:>

6. List all of the contents of the files with format of test*sh with the cat command.

mylinux:>cat test*sh
EARTH
EARTH
EARTH
EARTH
mylinux:>

As you can see above the test string “MARS” has been replaced with “EARTH”. This completes replacement of text string with Perl.

Larry Catt, OCP 9i, 10g
oracle@allcompute.com
www.allcompute.com