Bulk Modifying of Static HTML

While relocating the PeeWeeLinux web site I found myself needing to make bulk changes to a some 1800 static HTML pages. I had to insert a new HTML tag before the “head” tag on each page.

The search and replace workhorse in this method is “sed”, the Unix stream editor. I created the following shell script “sed.sh” in the root directory of the HTML content:

    sed '/</HEAD/ i        <!-- Inserted_before_closing_head_tag -->
    ' $1 > tmp.txt
    cat tmp.txt > $1

In order to apply these changes to each and every HTML file the following “find” command was executed:

    find . -name '*.html' -exec sh sed.sh {} ;

And “voilà”, all HTML files in the web directory now have a shiny new line with a HTML comment. A final step is to cleanup the temporary files created:

    rm sed.sh tmp.txt

On a side note, PeeWeeLinux is pretty outdated and has not seen any development in a long long time. However, I do still want to keep the web site and files alive, even if just for historic purposes. Not so long ago I have used Embedded Debian for a Compact Flash based system. It works quite well.