Pulsar is a small utility program for bulk search and replace on VB6 Project folders.
Description and Features
You give it a list of search and replace strings, a list of files to process, and it runs through the files repeating the search and replace list against the files list. The original files can optionally be renamed with a backup prefix, and the processed files can optionally be renamed using a seach and replace string pair.
This is useful when you have built a Project and partway through you find you want to rename the Project itself and occurrences of the name in the program, or anytime you need to make such changes all over within your multi-module Project.
The replace specs and the log of the last run are retained in a "Pulsar specs" file you can use again if required.
Like the VB6 IDE's Replace operation Pulsar can search and replace on Whole Words or Anywhere but it also has options to replace Prefixes or Suffixes. This gives you a little more flexibility.
Non-replaceable files (.frx, .res, binary files in general, etc.) can be included in the files list so they get backed up or renamed, but they can be de-selected so that Pulsar does not try to do search and replace on them. Pulsar is meant to work on ANSI files (like VB6 .frm, .vbp, etc.) and Unicode text files are not supported.
Caution:
There may well be bugs in the backup/renaming logic yet. It is safest to create a copy of your whole Project folder and operate on that right now. This may save you a lot of grief if (a.) your find and replace operations didn't do what you want, (b.) the changes are not easily reversible, and (c.) the backup process failed to work entirely correctly.
Author
Bob Riemersma
System Requirements
Windows XP or later. No special hardware or Edition required. VB6 required to compile this utility. No EXE provided in this initial 1.0 release.
Here I did a run against the Pulsar source folder, backing files up with the prefix "BK$" and renaming any file name parts of "Pulsar" to "Fudd" along the way. The replace string specs also change all whole words and prefixes of "Pulsar" to "Fudd" making my new Fudd program source.