Recursive search and replace in text files on Mac and Linux

Question

In the linux shell, the following command will recursively search and replace all instances of \'this\' with \'that\' (I don\'t have a Linux shell in front of me, but it sho

Answer 1

find . -type f | xargs sed -i '' 's/string1/string2/g'

Refer here for more info.

Answer 2

https://bitbucket.org/masonicboom/serp is a go utility (i.e. cross-platform), tested on OSX, that does recursive search-and-replace for text in files within a given directory, and confirms each replacement. It's new, so might be buggy.

Usage looks like:

$ ls test
a  d  d2 z
$ cat test/z
hi
$ ./serp --root test --search hi --replace bye --pattern "*"                         
test/z: replace hi with bye? (y/[n]) y
$ cat test/z
bye

Answer 3

None of the above work on OSX.

Do the following:

perl -pi -w -e 's/SEARCH_FOR/REPLACE_WITH/g;' *.txt

Answer 4

The command on OSX should be exactly the same as it is Unix under the pretty UI.

Answer 5

This is my workable one. on mac OS X 10.10.4

grep -e 'this' -rl . | xargs sed -i '' 's/this/that/g'

The above ones use find will change the files that do not contain the search text (add a new line at the file end), which is verbose.

Answer 6

A version that works on both Linux and Mac OS X (by adding the -e switch to sed):

export LC_CTYPE=C LANG=C
find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i -e 's/this/that/g'