Script or command line to comment out multiple lines in flat files

Question

I am looking for a way to go through multiple flat files within the same directory for the occurance of a server name and if found to insert a comment (#) at the beginning of the line. Currently, I am grepping for the server name within the directory and then doing a vi on each individual flat file to comment out the line. The server name is separated by the pipe (|) symbol and each line of every file is in this format:
webservers:WEBSERVER|Env Name|servername|application name
So, in the above, I am grepping for the servername part and if found in there, I want to change the line to:
#webservers:WEBSERVER|Env Name|servername|application name
I would think there would be a way of doing this either with command line Perl or with maybe awk or sed. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You could do something like this with a ksh shell script:
#!/usr/bin/ksh
for file in `ls`; do
        echo $file
        sed 's/^webserver/#webserver/g' $file > $file.parsed; mv $file.parsed $file
doneThis will go through everyfile in the directory and search for "start of line" webserver and replace it with "#webserver". Then the file will get move back to the original file name.
If you just want to change certain files ie. only filenames with the word "server" in it, then change:
for file in `ls`; do to something like
for file in `ls *server*`; doHope this help...
Cheers
pdaemon