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Search and replace in multiple files and save them with the same names - quickly and effectively!

Terminal - Search and replace in multiple files and save them with the same names - quickly and effectively!
for files in $(ls -A directory_name); do sed 's/search/replaced/g' $files > $files.new && mv $files.new $files; done;
2009-05-07 20:13:07
User: bassu
Functions: ls mv sed
-3
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Search and replace in multiple files and save them with the same names - quickly and effectively!

Yeah, there are many ways to do that.

Doing with sed by using a for loop is my favourite, because these are two basic things in all *nix environments. Sed by default does not allow to save the output in the same files so we'll use mv to do that in batch along with the sed.

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

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What others think

why not use sed -i ?

for files in $(ls -A directory_name); do sed -i 's/search/replaced/g' $files; done;

Comment by thebillywayne 211 weeks ago

Good catch thebillywayne. Thanks.

Comment by bassu 211 weeks ago

You can also trigger sed through 'find's exec function:

find . -name "*.php" -exec sed -i 's/old/new/g' {} \;

Comment by birnam 211 weeks ago

there's a command called replace that does this:

replace 'word' 'another word' -- *

From the man page:

NAME

replace - a string-replacement utility

SYNOPSIS

replace arguments

DESCRIPTION

The replace utility program changes strings in place in files or on the

standard input.

Invoke replace in one of the following ways:

replace from to [from to] ... -- file [file] ... replace from to [from to] ... < file
Comment by bunedoggle 210 weeks and 6 days ago

the 'replace' program that bunedoggle mentioned is part of the mysql-server-5.0 package, at least on my debian/ubuntu system.

Comment by bwoodacre 210 weeks and 4 days ago

"sed -i" isn't available on every UNIX system, as it's a GNU extension only.

Comment by realist 196 weeks and 2 days ago

Your point of view

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