Invoke replace in one of the following ways:

shell> replace from to [from to] ... -- file_name [file_name] ...
shell> replace from to [from to] ... < file_name

from represents a string to look for and to represents its replacement. There can be one or more pairs of strings.

Use the -- option to indicate where the string-replacement list ends and the file names begin. In this case, any file named on the command line is modified in place, so you may want to make a copy of the original before converting it. replace prints a message indicating which of the input files it actually modifies.

If the -- option is not given, replace reads the standard input and writes to the standard output.

replace uses a finite state machine to match longer strings first. It can be used to swap strings. For example, the following command swaps a and b in the given files, file1 and file2:

shell> replace a b b a -- file1 file2 ...

The replace program is used by msql2mysql. See msql2mysql(1).

replace supports the following options.

• -?, -I

Display a help message and exit.

• -#debug_options

Enable debugging.

• -s

Silent mode. Print less information what the program does.

• -v

Verbose mode. Print more information about what the program does.

• -V

Display version information and exit.