Bump a version string (or any text) across a file

Goal: Replace every occurrence of a string — like a version number — throughout a document, without losing the parts of the document that don’t match.

Prerequisites: The -U flag.

Query

$ mq -U 'select(contains("1.2.0")) | replace("1.2.0", "1.3.0")' CHANGELOG.md

Input

# My Project v1.2.0

Install version 1.2.0 to get started.

See the changelog for details.

Output

# My Project v1.3.0

Install version 1.3.0 to get started.

See the changelog for details.

Notes

• Without -U, mq prints only the nodes that matched select(...) — here, the “See the changelog for details.” paragraph would silently disappear from the output, since it never matched the contains("1.2.0") filter.
• With -U, mq prints the whole document back out, with only the matched-and-transformed nodes changed. This is the mode you want whenever the query’s job is “edit part of this file,” not “extract part of this file.”
• -U writes to stdout, not the file itself. To edit a file on disk, redirect to a temp file and move it back: mq -U '...' file.md > file.md.tmp && mv file.md.tmp file.md.