Etydhv

I often use the very handy replace command on my CentOS server:

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

It's not a standalone package even on the RPM side, I think it's part of a larger utility package. Anyway, I'm wondering if there's an Ubuntu equivalent of this? I know I can faff around with grep and sed, but replace is much more convenient.

It can be extracted from downloading the mariadb-server-10.1 package. This does not install mariadb-server.

cd /tmp
apt download mariadb-server-10.1
dpkg-deb -R mariadb-server-10.1_1%3a10.1.38-0ubuntu0.18.04.2_amd64.deb .
sudo cp usr/bin/replace /usr/bin/

Then run replace

$ replace -?
replace Ver 1.4 for Linux at x86_64
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the GPL license

This program replaces strings in files or from stdin to stdout.
It accepts a list of from-string/to-string pairs and replaces
each occurrence of a from-string with the corresponding to-string.
The first occurrence of a found string is matched. If there is
more than one possibility for the string to replace, longer
matches are preferred before shorter matches.

A from-string can contain these special characters:
 ^ Match start of line.
 $ Match end of line.
 b Match space-character, start of line or end of line.
 For a end b the next replace starts locking at the end
 space-character. A b alone in a string matches only a
 space-character.

Usage: replace [-?svIV] from to from to ... -- [files]
or
Usage: replace [-?svIV] from to from to ... < fromfile > tofile

Options: -? or -I "Info" -s "silent" -v "verbose"

The mariadb-server-10.1, mysql-server-5.7 and percona-xtradb-cluster-server-5.7 packages contain versions of replace, but these versions seem to be mostly old and some are even deprecated.

The software has a website called https://replace.richardlloyd.org.uk where you can download the latest version (2.24 currently) as a .tar.gz file. Follow these steps to install replace from this file:

1. 
   

   Extract the .tar.gz archive:

   
   
   

   tar xf replace-*.tar.gz
   

   
   


2. 
   

   Change into the directory:

   
   
   

   cd replace-*/
   

   
   


3. 
   

   The installation needs gmake, but it’s called make in Ubuntu, so create a symlink:

   
   
   

   sudo ln -s /usr/bin/make /usr/bin/gmake
   

   
   


4. 
   

   Run gmake:

   
   
   

   gmake
   

   
   


5. 
   

   Change the shebang of tests/runtests to bash (because it uses let, which sh doesn’t have):

   
   
   

   sed '1s/sh/bash/' tests/runtests
   

   
   


6. 
   

   Run the tests:

   
   
   

   gmake test
   

   
   


7. 
   

   Install the software to /usr/local/bin/replace:

   
   
   

   sudo gmake install
   

   
   

Once it’s installed you can remove the /usr/bin/gmake symlink as well as the replace-N.NN/ directory and the .tar.gz file:

cd .. && rm -r replace-*/ replace-*.tar.gz && sudo rm /usr/bin/gmake