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

OS X uses a mix of BSD and GNU tools, so best always check the documentation (although I had it that less didn't even conform to the OS X manpage):

https://web.archive.org/web/20170808213955/https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/sed.1.html

sed takes the argument after -i as the extension for backups. Provide an empty string (-i '') for no backups.

The following should do:

LC_ALL=C find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i '' s/this/that/ {} +

The -type f is just good practice; sed will complain if you give it a directory or so. -exec is preferred over xargs; you needn't bother with -print0 or anything. The {} + at the end means that find will append all results as arguments to one instance of the called command, instead of re-running it for each result. (One exception is when the maximal number of command-line arguments allowed by the OS is breached; in that case find will run more than one instance.)

Answer 2

For the mac, a more similar approach would be this:

find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "" "s/form/forms/g"

Answer 3

I used this format - but...I found I had to run it three or more times to get it to actually change every instance which I found extremely strange. Running it once would change some in each file but not all. Running exactly the same string two-four times would catch all instances.

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i '' s/thistext/newtext/ {} +

Answer 4

could just say $PWD instead of "."

Answer 5

On Mac OSX 10.11.5 this works fine:

grep -rli 'old-word' * | xargs -I@ sed -i '' 's/old-word/new-word/g' @

Answer 6

If you are using a zsh terminal you're able to use wildcard magic:

sed -i "" "s/search/high-replace/g" *.txt