I tried this line, but it doesn't work:
find . -name '*.tex' -exec 'perl -0777 -pi -e "s/\%\%if.+?\%\%fi//g" {}' \;
I get :
find: ‘perl -0777 -pi -e "s/\\%\\%if.+?\\%\\%fi//g" ./colophon.tex’: No such file or directory
find: ‘perl -0777 -pi -e "s/\\%\\%if.+?\\%\\%fi//g" ./glossary.tex’: No such file or directory
But the following works:
find . -name '*.tex' -print0 | xargs -n1 -0 perl -0777 -pi -e "s/\%\%if.+?\%\%fi//gs"
Is it possible to use -exec instead?
A command like
find . -name '*.tex' -exec 'perl -0777 -pi -e "s/\%\%if.+?\%\%fi//g" {}' \;
will cause the find program to receive these arguments (each on a separate line, without escaping):
find
.
-name
*.tex
-exec
perl -0777 -pi -e "s/\%\%if.+?\%\%fi//g" {}
;
That is, the single quotes make the entire intended perl -0777 -pi -e "s/\%\%if.+?\%\%fi//g" {} command into a single command-line argument.
However, find is not designed to work with that. It expects separate arguments instead:
find
.
-name
*.tex
-exec
perl
-0777
-pi
-e
s/\%\%if.+?\%\%fi//g
{}
;
When find parses its arguments and finds a -exec argument, it will treat everything from there until either ; or + as the command template. Within each token, {} will be replaced with a filename from the actual search process, and then these tokens represent the command that will be run.
Thus, without quotes, the commands will look like perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\%\%if.+?\%\%fi//g' colophon.tex, (supposing that we re-constitute a command line that would tokenize the same way; of course, this is not necessary, since find already has the pre-processed tokens required to make a system call).
With quotes, the commands will look like in the error message: the TeX filenames were interpolated into the command, but the command is still a single shell token which doesn't match the name of any program (hence, "No such file or directory"). It is the same as how explicitly typing 'perl -0777 -pi -e "s/\\%\\%if.+?\\%\\%fi//g" ./colophon.tex' (with the single quotes) at the command prompt wouldn't work.