What's the fastest / most efficient find/replace app on *nix

Question

I've got a large SQL dump 250MB+ and I need to replace www.mysite with dev.mysite. I have tried nano and vi for doing find/replace but both choke. Nano can't even open it, and vi has been doing the find/replace now for an hour.

Anyone know of a tool on *nix or windows systems that does fast Find/Replace on large files?

Answer 1

sed -i 's/www\.mysite/dev.mysite/g' dump.sql

(requires temporary storage space equal to the size of the input)

Answer 2

Search/replace on a SQL dump is not a good idea

• They aren't text files
• SQL syntax errors are easily introduced
• They contain very long lines sometimes.

What you should do is load it into a non-production database server, run the appropriate UPDATE statements then dump it again. You can use the REPLACE function in MySQL for this.