rpl

https://github.com/rrthomas/rpl
© 2025 Reuben Thomas [email protected]

A search/replace utility.

rpl replaces strings with new strings in multiple text files.

rpl is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option), any later version. See the file COPYING for more details.

rpl is written in Vala, based on an earlier Python program by Christian Häggström, Göran Weinholt, Kevin Coyner, Jochen Kupperschmidt and Reuben Thomas.

Installation

If you’re lucky, rpl will be available from your distribution, such as Ubuntu or Homebrew.

Building from source

To build rpl you will need a C compiler, GNU Make, GLib, PCRE2 and uchardet. These should already be packaged in most distributions. (Although rpl is written in Vala, a Vala compiler is only needed for development.)

Download the latest release, and unpack it with tar. cd into the unpacked sources, and run:

./configure
make check

Once you’re happy you can run make install, possibly with sudo.

Some of the tests require sudo to run. You will need to use a user or session that can use sudo without a password. In many setups, you can run sudo true to authenticate, and will then be able to run the tests (with make check as usual) for some period of time before the authentication expires. If sudo does not work, the tests that require it will be skipped.

The code coverage test target assert-full-coverage requires all the tests to have been run.

Building from git

As well as the dependencies for building from source, you will need Vala, automake, autoconf, gengetopt and help2man. These should be packaged in most distributions.

Having cloned the repository, run autoreconf -fi, then follow the instructions above for building from source.

Usage

rpl [OPTION...] OLD-TEXT NEW-TEXT [FILE ...]

See rpl --help or the man page rpl(1) for more information.