I recently had to perform a mundane task. Basically, I needed to trawl through about 50 sql text files and duplicate them, but replacing the string dev-server with sit-server. And then I had to do it all over again with prod-server.
I knew I could easily do this using the Linux find and sed commands together. But I’m starting to think Powershell these days and was curious to see what it had to offer for the task at hand.

Some quick Googling brought me to this post on the very topic. I opted for the script version of the command (as distinct from the shell version), which was:

$a = (gci | ? {$_.Attributes -ne "Directory"}); 
$a | % { cp $_ "$($_).bak";
(gc $_) -replace "dev-server","sit-server" | sc -path $_ }

In the first line, the script assigns to the variable $a all of the files in the directory (by excluding directories). gci is an alias to Get-Child-Item.
The 2nd line creates a backup of each sql file, before the operation is performed. Good, organised, cautious approach. Rollback is a buggar – when you can’t.
The third line performs the actual find and replace operation in each of the text files in the directory.

That tiny script bought me about 30 minutes. And a very boring 30 minutes it would have been!