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This is a very basic question but I don't find the answer by googling it. I'm doing in a php program a simple call to perl to find and replace strings in many files:

exec("perl -pi -e 's|foo|bar|g' `find . -name *.foo`");

and I would like the command to return the number of replacements. Anyone knows how to do that? Thank you.

eumiro
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Patrick
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    Mind boggling... you call find from perl from PHP. s/// returns the number of substitutions made. I also had this question once: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3103319 – musiKk Jan 19 '11 at 15:17
  • possible duplicate of [How many substitutions took place in a Perl s///g?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3103319/how-many-substitutions-took-place-in-a-perl-s-g) – philant Jan 19 '11 at 15:21

2 Answers2

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The s/// operator returns the number of substitutions that were made, so it is a simple matter of adding them together:

perl -pi -e '$C+=s|foo|bar|g; END{print"$C\n"}' `find . -name *.foo`
mob
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try this :

exec("perl -pi -e 'END { print($c) } $c += s|foo|bar|g' find . -name *.foo");

It'll print the number of replacements. You can then retrieve it from your exec. If you'd rather want the number to be in the return value of the process, you can try :

exec("perl -pi -e 'END { exit($c) } $c += s|foo|bar|g' find . -name *.foo");

But as said before, it's strange to call Perl from PHP.

dams
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    `exit` will coerce the input to a value between 0 and 255 (on most OS), so it's most helpful when you expect the result to be small. – mob Jan 20 '11 at 16:21