Shell Tip of the Day: Using find and sed For Fun and Profit

So I recently was tweaking the <meta> HTML tags on my posts to make them a little nicer for sharing on social media (notably Twitter). The idea is that if you add a few specific <meta> tags to your HTML pages then if that page is shared on say Twitter, Twitter will make use of that metadata to render a nice looking tweet that's more appealing (and therefore more likely to be clicked). I already added some Opengraph tags (ie <meta property='og:...), but Twitter, because it has to be unique will make use of some Twitter specific ones.

This link is a good resource for getting started, and this link and this link allow you to verify that your tags are correct once you're done.

That's all fine and good, but there can be a problem. Twitter will sometimes cache the image you supply to the twitter:image tag, and if it sees a bad image at that url, will fail to update it even though you fix the image. Their advice is to rename the url so it forces a re-index (dumb, but hey, whatevs).

This raises a problem: my image is specified in each post (because I sometimes change the image for a specific article), so that meant I had to update a bunch of files that had the line:

cover: static/imgs/default_page_image.jpg

to the line:

cover: static/imgs/default_page_imagev2.jpg

I could do this manually, but this is where shell utilities like find and sed come in handy. In the directory containing all my markdown for my posts I just did:

find . -name '*.md' -exec sed -i '' s/default_page_image/default_page_imagev2/ {} +

And voila, done.