wp-cli search-replace, limit rows

but is there a way to limit its action to a set of rows?

It’s not possible, no.

i want to change links found in a set of posts, but leave those same links alone if found in other posts. there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this, and using a mySQL command to (via wp-cli) to find/replace on serialized postmeta is… ugh.

Have you considered creating a custom table with the same schema as wp_postmeta, copying the rows you want to modify to those tables, and then copying the data back after you’ve performed the search/replace procedure?

It’d require a little bit of custom scripting, but it seems like you could do this in an automated manner.

Thanks Daniel – that’s a great idea, I bet I could do that.