Find and Replace string in all files recursive using grep and sed

Question

I m getting a   sed  -e expression  1  char 22  unterminated  s  command    is there a  problem on my script  Also the  oldstring  has special characters    bin bash oldstring   lt script gt   oldscript   lt  script gt   newstring   lt script gt   newscript   lt  script gt   grep -rl  oldstring  path to folder   xargs sed -i s  oldstring  newstring g

User · Answer

sed expression needs to be quoted  sed -i  s  oldstring  newstring g

User · Answer

As  Didier said  you can change your delimiter to something other than     grep -rl  oldstring  path to folder   xargs sed -i s  oldstring  newstring g

User · Answer

The GNU guys REALLY messed up when they introduced recursive file searching to grep  grep is for finding REs in files and printing the matching line  g re p remember   NOT for finding files  There s a perfectly good tool with a very obvious name for FINDing files  Whatever happened to the UNIX mantra of do one thing and do it well   Anyway  here s how you d do what you want using the traditional UNIX approach  untested    find  path to folder -type f -print   while IFS  read -r file do    awk -v old   oldstring  -v new   newstring          BEGIN  rlength   length old          rstart   index  0 old     0   substr  0 rstart-1  new substr  0 rstart rlength            print          file   gt  tmp  amp  amp     mv tmp   file  done   Not that by using awk index   instead of sed and grep you avoid the need to escape all of the RE metacharacters that might appear in either your old or your new string plus figure out a character to use as your sed delimiter that can t appear in your old or new strings  and that you don t need to run grep since the replacement will only occur for files that do contain the string you want  Having said all of that  if you don t want the file timestamp to change if you don t modify the file  then just do a diff on tmp and the original file before doing the mv or throw in an fgrep -q before the awk   Caveat  The above won t work for file names that contain newlines  If you have those then let us know and we can show you how to handle them

User · Answer

grep -rl SOSTITUTETHIS     xargs sed -Ei  s     SOSTITUTETHIS      1WITHTHIS 2 g

User · Answer

grep -rl  oldstring     xargs sed -i  s  oldstring  newstring g

[linux] Find and Replace string in all files recursive using grep and sed

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