Eclipse can automate a lot of stuff for you. One thig is did for me was automating the serialVersionId generation for all the serializable classes in my tree.
They look like this:
/**
*
*/
private static final long serialVersionUID = -9031744976450947933L;
However, it put an empty block comment in on top of them, something I didn’t notice until I had mixed in this commit with another. So, I want to remove those empty comment blocks.
#!/bin/bash
for JAVAFILE in `find . -name \*.java`
do
sed -n '1h;1!H;${;g;s! */\*\*\n *\* *\n *\*/ *\n!!g;p;}' \
< $JAVAFILE > $JAVAFILE.new
mv $JAVAFILE.new $JAVAFILE
done
Thanks to this article for how to do the multiline search and replace.
http://austinmatzko.com/2008/04/26/sed-multi-line-search-and-replace/
If you want to identify comments with regexes, you really need to use the regex as a tokenizer. I.e., it identifies and extracts the first thing in the string, whether that thing be a string literal, a comment, or a block of stuff that is neither string literal nor comment. Then you grab the remainder of the string and pull the next token off the beginning.