recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
grep -rl oldstring . |xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/oldstring/newstring'
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This command find all files in the current dir and subdirs, and replace all occurances of "oldstring" in every file with "newstring".
16find . -type f -exec sed -i s/oldstring/newstring/g {} + -
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.
4grep -rl oldstring . | parallel sed -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/' -
Using -Z with grep and -0 with xargs handles file names with spaces and special characters.
1grep -rlZ oldstring . | xargs -0 sed -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/' -
Search and replace recursively. :-) Shorter and simpler than the others. And allows more terms: replace old new [old new ...] -- `find -type f`
1replace old new -- `find -type f` -
Does a search and replace across multiple files with a subgroup replacement.
0find . -name "*.txt" | xargs -n 1 perl -pi -w -e "s/text([0-9])/other\$1/g;"
What do you think?
Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?
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find -type f | xargs sed -i -e '/oldstring/s,oldstring,newstring,'grep -rLZ newstring . |xargs -0 sed -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/'The -L tells grep to invert the search (-v doesn't do what you want) and the grep -Z and xargs -0 go together to ignore whitespace and allow spaces in filenames.