Python script to change the contents or names of a set of files using regular expressions.

I find it handy for changing variable names and version numbers on a project.

To use it you specify the old pattern, the new pattern and the list of files.

The patterns are in python regular expression format which makes it easy to change text that contains things like forward slashes.

Here is a detailed example thats shows how to change foo to bar in several files and stores the results in the local tmp directory tree. To see other examples look at test/test.sh.

    $ tree example/
      example
      ├── foo-bar.txt
      └── foo.txt
      
      0 directories, 2 files

    $ cat foo.txt
    foo foo

    $ cat foo-bar.txt
    foo foo
    
    $ change -p tmp/ foo bar foo.txt foo-bar.txt
    
    $ tree tmp
      tmp
      ├── bar-bar.txt
      └── bar.txt
    
      0 directories, 2 files

If you want to substitute characters that used in regular expressions like '.', you must escape it with a backslash '\.'.

If you want to only replace words use '\b' like this '\bfoobarspam\b'.

For other options see the documentation for Python regular expressions.