How to change all occurrences of a word in all files in a directory

Question

I was in the process of creating a User class where one of the methods was get_privileges();.

After hours of slamming my head into the keyb

Answer 1

A variation that takes into account subdirectories (untested):

find /var/www -type f -exec sed -i 's/privelages/privileges/g' {} \;

This will find all files (not directories, specified by -type f) under /var/www, and perform a sed command to replace "privelages" with "privileges" on each file it finds.

Answer 2

I generally use this short script, which will rename a string in all files and all directory names and filenames. To use it, you can copy the text below into a file called replace_string, run sudo chmod u+x replace_string and then move it into your sudo mv replace_string /usr/local/bin folder to be able to execute it in any directory.

NOTE: this only works on linux (tested on ubuntu), and fails on MacOS. Also be careful with this because it can mess up things like git files. I haven't tested it on binaries either.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# This will replace all instances of a string in folder names, filenames,
# and within files.  Sometimes you have to run it twice, if directory names change.


# Example usage:
# replace_string apple banana

echo $1
echo $2

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i -e "s/$1/$2/g" {} \;  # rename within files
find ./ -type d -exec rename "s/$1/$2/g" {} \;    # rename directories
find ./ -type f -exec rename "s/$1/$2/g" {} \;  # rename files

Answer 3

for Mac OS:

find . -type f -name '*.sql' -exec sed -i '' s/privelages/privileges/ {} +

Matwilso's script from above would then look like this if it were designed to work on Mac OS

#!/bin/bash

# This will replace all instances of a string in folder names, filenames,
# and within files.  Sometimes you have to run it twice, if directory names change.


# Example usage:
# replace_string apple banana

echo ${1}
echo ${2}

find . -type f -name '*.sql' -exec sed -i '' s/${1}/${2}/ {} + # inside sql scripts

Answer 4

Check this out: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-linux-replace-string-words-in-many-files/

cd /var/www
sed -i 's/privelages/privileges/g' *