[Tutor] Changing lines in a set of files

[Karen Windus]

Hi -

I've been wrestling with this problem for about a week now (I'm a newbie).  
I want to open a series of files from a directory, matchand replace a 
substring in the files and then (here's the tricky part for me) save and 
close the files.

This script works, until I introduced the input and output file objects.

I'm not so sure how the input and output files work.  Here's what I have so 
far:

#! /usr/bin/env python

import string, sys, fileinput
# take the first argument out of sys.argv and assign it to searchterm
searchterm, sys.argv[1:] = sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2:]
inputfiles, outputfiles = fileinput.input()
for inputfilename in inputfilenames:
    for line in fileinput.input():
         num_matches = string.count(line, searchterm)
         new_string = string.replace(line,searchterm,"Feedback")
         if num_matches:
            inputfile = open(fileinput.filename(), 'r')
            new_string = string.replace(line,searchterm,"Feedback")
            print new_string
            # a nonzero count means there was a match
            print "found '%s' %d times in %s on line %d." % (searchterm, 
num_matches,
      fileinput.filename(), fileinput.filelineno())
            outputfiles=open(fileinput.filename(),'w')
write_results(outputfiles)
fileinput.nextfile()
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