[SOLVED] Using sed to delete some text on multiple files in a directory

Issue

I'm removing the same text from a number of files using

sed -n -i '' '/<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>/q;p'  myfile.emlx

which works so far.

I understand that I can run this over all the files in the current directory. I tested this using

sed -i ''  's/^/\t/'  *.txt

and that worked as expected, however when I try

sed -n -i '' '/<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>/q;p' *.emlx

although the first file is correctly ammended and saved, all the text from all the other files is removed. I've tried various combinations of -i and -n etc but can't work out my problem.

Solution

The problem with your approach is that sed carries patterns across file boundaries. You will want to revert to running one sed instance per file.

for file in *.emlx; do
    sed -n -i '' '/<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>/q;p' "$file"
done

Quick demo:

bash$ printf '%s\n' >foo "one" "two" "three"
bash$ printf '%s\n' >bar "four" "five" "six"
bash$ tail *
===> foo <===
one
two
three
===> bar <===
four
five
six
bash$ sed '/two/,/five/d' foo bar
one
six

Answered By - tripleee

Answer Checked By - Katrina (WPSolving Volunteer)