Best way to do a find/replace in several files?

Question

what\'s the best way to do this? I\'m no command line warrior, but I was thinking there\'s possibly a way of using grep and cat.

I just want to

Answer 1

I'll throw in another example for folks using ag, The Silver Searcher to do find/replace operations on multiple files.

Complete example:

ag -l "search string" | xargs sed -i '' -e 's/from/to/g'

If we break this down, what we get is:

# returns a list of files containing matching string
ag -l "search string"

Next, we have:

# consume the list of piped files and prepare to run foregoing command
# for each file delimited by newline
xargs

Finally, the string replacement command:

# -i '' means edit files in place and the '' means do not create a backup
# -e 's/from/to/g' specifies the command to run, in this case,
# global, search and replace

sed -i '' -e 's/from/to/g'