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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 . | parallel sed -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/'
2010-01-28 08:44:16
User: unixmonkey8046
Functions: grep sed
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.

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Alternatives

There are 3 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
$ grep -rl oldstring . |xargs sed -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/'
2009-03-03 20:10:19
User: netfortius
Functions: grep sed
Tags: perl 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'
Comments (7) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
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 -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
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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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