Replace “Month Date Time” formatted dates with “Month Year Date Time” formatted dates in multiple files

Question

I have some files in a directory that contain dates that are formatted like:

December 29 19:05:58

But they differ referring to the date that the file was created.

Is there any way to do a search-replace on these files to replace the dates with ones that look like:

December 29 2010 19:05:58

I am on Mac OS X.

EDIT: To clarify, any scripting would be fine, i.e: sed or shell/ruby scripts.

Answer 1

I don't think it's possible without a powerful text editor or some scripting.

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Use the following regular expression in TextMate:

Search:

(January|February|March|April|May|June|July|August|September|October|November|December) (\d{1,2}) (\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2})

Replace with:

$1 $2 2010 $2

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Depending on the number of files scripting would be faster. I'd opt for an editor like TextMate if it's not too much work -- this way, you get to check each substitution before you save.

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For the sake of completeness:

cat src.txt | sed "s/\([A-Z][a-z]\{1,\} [0-9]\{1,2\}\) \([0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]\)/\1 2010 \2/g" > dest.txt

People who use sed regularly may laugh now, I don't care.

Answer 2

Try this (for OS X, replace the -r with -E):

sed -r 's/(January|February|March|April|May|June|July|August|September|October|November|December)( [0-9 ][0-9] )(([0-9][0-9]:){2}[0-9][0-9])/\1\22010 \3/'