JReplaceThem: Multiple find and replace made easy and fast!

There is a famous saying “Necessity is the Mother of all Inventions” but for me necessity gives me chance to test new software! And I just had another opportunity to test out a freeware utility!

Ever had a situation when you needed to find and replace same content in a large number of files? Well, I had one situation recently and the number of files was a staggering 0.2 million! Manual find and replace was out of the equation. Since, they were HTML files, I thought of using the Macromedia Dreamweaver which has got an excellent find and replace dialogue box. But apparently, I was expecting too much from the software which is essentially an excellent HTML editor! It worked well, but the large number of files made sure that either it crashed while making the edits or took awfully long to do the changes. 2 different changes in 0.2 million files means an incredible 0.4 millions find and replace. It needed a specialist application and I found out JReplaceThem through a Google search. It is a Java based application which needs Java Runtime Installed. The install sizes without the JRE installer is 1.1 Megs which is a tag heavy for such a utility but I have found that Java based applications are generally on the heavier side.

The interface is simple. The basic interface is divided into 3 sections. One each for “search for:”, “replace with:” and “files to edit”. User is free to choose specific files, entire folders and sub-folders and even particular format files in a specific directory. The application also supports regular expressions in the searches though my requirement was pretty basic. The software worked well as per expectations. The speed was pretty decent compared to Dreamweaver. While I had 2 crashes and a long 8 hour wait (where I had to cancel the process at around 25% of the processing), JReplaceThem made all the 0.4 million find and replaces within 2-3 hours.

Since it is a JRE based application, it can be made to run on any java supported Operating System. But it sure has few bugs. Sometimes it failed to select all the subfolders inside a particular folder and another time it refused to work again after 1 procedure was completed. And sometimes it simply refused to exit. Darn Java Applications. Since, I could not find anything better, and it did the job finally, I would suggest you can give it a try!

Download: JReplaceThem