I need to recursively search for a specified string within all files and subdirectories within a directory and replace this string with another string.
I know that t
This works best for me on OS X:
grep -r -l 'searchtext' . | sort | uniq | xargs perl -e "s/matchtext/replacetext/" -pi
Source: http://www.praj.com.au/post/23691181208/grep-replace-text-string-in-files
Other solutions mix regex syntaxes. To use perl/PCRE patterns for both search and replace, and only process matching files, this works quite well:
grep -rlIZPi 'match1' | xargs -0r perl -pi -e 's/match2/replace/gi;'
match1
and match2
are usually identical but match1
can be simplified to remove more advanced features that are only relevant to the substitution, e.g. capturing groups.
Translation: grep
recursively and list matching filenames, each separated by nul to protect any special characters; pipe any filenames to xargs
which is expecting a nul-separated list; if any filenames are received, pass them to perl
to perform the actual substitutions.
For case-sensitive matching, drop the i
flag from grep
and the i
pattern modifier from the s///
expression, but not the i
flag from perl
itself. Remove the I
flag from grep
to include binary files.
Be very careful when using find
and sed
in a git repo! If you don't exclude the binary files you can end up with this error:
error: bad index file sha1 signature
fatal: index file corrupt
To solve this error you need to revert the sed
by replacing your new_string
with your old_string
. This will revert your replaced strings, so you will be back to the beginning of the problem.
The correct way to search for a string and replace it is to skip find
and use grep
instead in order to ignore the binary files:
sed -ri -e "s/old_string/new_string/g" $(grep -Elr --binary-files=without-match "old_string" "/files_dir")
Credits for @hobs
Another option is to use find and then pass it through sed.
find /path/to/files -type f -exec sed -i 's/oldstring/new string/g' {} \;
Usually not with grep, but rather with sed -i 's/string_to_find/another_string/g'
or perl -i.bak -pe 's/string_to_find/another_string/g'
.
Here is what I would do:
find /path/to/dir -type f -iname "*filename*" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '/searchstring/s/old/new/g'
this will look for all files containing filename
in the file's name under the /path/to/dir
, than for every file found, search for the line with searchstring
and replace old
with new
.
Though if you want to omit looking for a specific file with a filename
string in the file's name, than simply do:
find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '/searchstring/s/old/new/g'
This will do the same thing above, but to all files found under /path/to/dir
.