Globally Replace Old School $PHP_SELF with $SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’] using sed

Not being an sed expert, I need to replace all instances of the string $PHP_SELF with $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] globally in a directory.

This is an “old school” osCommerce application that I need to resurrect temporarily for a showcase.

Answer

sed doesn’t recurse on it’s own so you’ll need to use another tool for that, find is generally the right answer.

Run this in the top-level directory. sed will make a backup of each file it reads with a .bak extension (regardless if it actually does a replacement). If you don’t want the backup behavior, use -i instead of -i.bak

I recommend you first try this on a test directory to make sure it meets expectations.

#!/bin/bash

while IFS= read -r -d $'' file; do
   sed -i.bak $'s/$PHP_SELF/$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']/g' "$file"
done < <(find . -type f -name "*.php" -print0)