So there’s actually a story behind this
My conkyrc file has grown to a fairly large size and it’s a bit of a pain to go through it to change the colors. After all there’s lots of ${color} in it
So I needed a command that could do this for me. That’s when I found sed, a stream editor. sed can replace a word or set of words with a different word or set of words.
There’s a couple different ways to use sed. You can have it replace only the first instance of a word in a sentence or you can have it replace the word globally.
To replace only the first instance of a word in a sentence the command looks like this
sed -i ‘s/original_word/new_word/’ file.txt
To change all instances of a word in a file the command is
sed -i ‘s/original_word/new_word/g’ file.txt
the “g” at the end tells sed to perform the action globally.
You can also do more than one word, like a phrase. To do this correctly you need to use a “\” backslash before the space. So for example I wanted to replace all instances of “black” with “light blue” in my conkyrc. This is what the command looked like
sed -i ‘s/black/light\ blue/g’ .conkyrc
That saved me about 5 minutes of editing my conkyrc.
So there you have it, a very useful time saving command.
Or you can use the Replace button in Gedit which somehow I managed to overlook while trying to figure out a command to do this!



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