To install:
gem install knife-essentials
Knife-essentials contains the latest version of the knife download, upload, diff, deps, list, show, delete, edit, xargs and raw commands.
This particular release of knife-essentials includes the new tools “knife edit” and “knife xargs”:
knife edit: lets you edit any sort of object
knife edit roles/base.json environments/desert.json
<brings up your editor on each matching file, and uploads it if it is changed>
knife xargs: a powerful bulk read/edit command that passes Chef objects through a program
To look for all nodes with attributes named foo or values containing foo:
knife list /nodes/* | knife xargs -n 40 grep foo
To replace “foo” with “bar” in all roles on the server:
knife list roles/* | knife xargs – sed -i ‘s/foo/bar’
–John Keiser (@jkeiser2)