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recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files

Terminal - recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
$ grep -rl oldstring . |xargs sed -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/'
2009-03-03 20:10:19
User: netfortius
Functions: grep sed
23
Up
Down
recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files

recursively traverse the directory structure from . down, look for string "oldstring" in all files, and replace it with "newstring", wherever found

also:

grep -rl oldstring . |xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/oldstring/newstring'
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Alternatives

There are 6 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
find . -type f -exec sed -i s/oldstring/newstring/g {} +
2009-12-09 00:46:13
User: SlimG
Functions: find sed
Tags: sed find
12
Up
Down
recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files

This command find all files in the current dir and subdirs, and replace all occurances of "oldstring" in every file with "newstring".

Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
grep -rl oldstring . | parallel sed -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/'
2010-01-28 08:44:16
User: unixmonkey8046
Functions: grep sed
Tags: sed xargs parallel
3
Up
Down
recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files

xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). To see the problem try this:

touch important_file

touch 'not important_file'

ls not* | xargs rm

Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
grep -rlZ oldstring . | xargs -0 sed -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/'
2011-10-18 19:14:02
User: thoughtcriminal
Functions: grep sed xargs
Tags: sed
1
Up
Down
recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files

Using -Z with grep and -0 with xargs handles file names with spaces and special characters.

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replace old new -- `find -type f`
2012-12-13 20:22:17
User: brian
Tags: sed find
0
Up
Down
recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files

Search and replace recursively. :-) Shorter and simpler than the others. And allows more terms:

replace old new [old new ...] -- `find -type f`

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Know a better way?

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What others think

so sweet and delicious

Comment by linuxrawkstar 220 weeks and 2 days ago

egrep might be better in some cases

Comment by linuxrawkstar 220 weeks and 2 days ago

find . -type f -exec grep -l XXX {} \;|tee /tmp/fileschanged|xargs perl -pi.bak -e 's/XXX/YYY/g'

Find all files that contain string XXX in them, change the string from XXX to YYY, make a backup copy of the file and save a list of files changed in /tmp/fileschanged.

Comment by drossman 220 weeks ago
find -type f | xargs sed -i -e '/oldstring/s,oldstring,newstring,'
Comment by rbossy 186 weeks ago

grep before using sed is unnecessary, it causes all files to be read and processed TWICE instead of just once.

Just use find and sed.

Comment by SlimG 180 weeks and 2 days ago

If you can install "rpl", have a look at man rpl. It does the same job more simply. I don't know how it would compare for speed though.

Comment by johnraff 180 weeks and 2 days ago

if you do this on a directory using subversion, ignore the .svn directories, or you'll get a surprise when asking for svn status.

Comment by zaninottof 158 weeks and 4 days ago

Your point of view

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