Sometimes, I reach the limit of what I can do with a line of find | grep | sed and all the \/\/$.*()\/\/ that goes in… Write once, never come back. It almost look like perl sometimes…

Few days ago, I’ve just realized that emacs has a batch mode: you write your function (leveraging all the existing emacs functions), put it in a file and you can apply it on a bunch of files:

emacs -batch myfile.cc \
-l the-lisp-file.el \
-f the-function

Not necessarily the fastest or the most portable, but if you happen to have the right emacs function around, that’s invaluable. For example, I wouldn’t be too sure how to grep/sed to do this:

(defun apply-style ()
  (c-set-style "stroustrup")
  (indent-region (point-min) (point-max) nil)
  (save-buffer))