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

Whenever I type this command I always seem to hose it up, or forget a flag. I created a Gist on github based off of TaylanUB's answer that does a global find replace from the current directory. This is Mac OSX specific.

https://gist.github.com/nateflink/9056302

It's nice because now I just pop open a terminal then copy in:

curl -s https://gist.github.com/nateflink/9056302/raw/findreplaceosx.sh | bash -s "find-a-url.com" "replace-a-url.com"

You can get some weird byte sequence errors, so here is the full code:

#!/bin/bash
#By Nate Flink

#Invoke on the terminal like this
#curl -s https://gist.github.com/nateflink/9056302/raw/findreplaceosx.sh | bash -s "find-a-url.com" "replace-a-url.com"

if [ -z "$1" ] || [ -z "$2" ]; then
  echo "Usage: ./$0 [find string] [replace string]"
  exit 1
fi

FIND=$1
REPLACE=$2

#needed for byte sequence error in ascii to utf conversion on OSX
export LC_CTYPE=C;
export LANG=C;

#sed -i "" is needed by the osx version of sed (instead of sed -i)
find . -type f -exec sed -i "" "s|${FIND}|${REPLACE}|g" {} +
exit 0

Answer 2

As an alternative solution, I'm using this one on Mac OSX 10.7.5

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

Credit goes to: Todd Cesere's answer