How to grep and replace

Question

I need to recursively search for a specified string within all files and subdirectories within a directory and replace this string with another string   I know that the command to find it might look like this   grep  string to find  -r       But how can I replace every instance of string to find with another string

User · Answer

Other solutions mix regex syntaxes  To use perl PCRE patterns for both search and replace  and only process matching files  this works quite well  grep -rlIZPi  match1    xargs -0r perl -pi -e  s match2 replace gi    match1 and match2 are usually identical but match1 can be simplified to remove more advanced features that are only relevant to the substitution  e g  capturing groups  Translation  grep recursively and list matching filenames  each separated by nul to protect any special characters  pipe any filenames to xargs which is expecting a nul-separated list  if any filenames are received  pass them to perl to perform the actual substitutions  For case-sensitive matching  drop the i flag from grep and the i pattern modifier from the s    expression  but not the i flag from perl itself  Remove the I flag from grep to include binary files

User · Answer

Usually not with grep  but rather with sed -i  s string to find another string g  or perl -i bak -pe  s string to find another string g

User · Answer

Another option would be to just use perl with globstar   Enabling shopt -s globstar in your  bashrc  or wherever  allows the    glob pattern to match all sub-directories and files recursively   Thus using perl -pXe  s SEARCH REPLACE g  -i    will recursively replace SEARCH with REPLACE   The -X flag tells perl to  disable all warnings  - which means that it won t complain about directories   The globstar also allows you to do things like sed -i  s SEARCH REPLACE g       ext if you wanted to replace SEARCH with REPLACE in all child files with the extension  ext

User · Answer

I got the answer   grep -rl matchstring somedir    xargs sed -i  s string1 string2 g

User · Answer

Another option is to use find and then pass it through sed   find  path to files -type f -exec sed -i  s oldstring new string g

User · Answer

Be very careful when using find and sed in a git repo  If you don t exclude the binary files you can end up with this error   error  bad index file sha1 signature  fatal  index file corrupt   To solve this error you need to revert the sed by replacing your new string with your old string  This will revert your replaced strings  so you will be back to the beginning of the problem   The correct way to search for a string and replace it is to skip find and use grep instead in order to ignore the binary files   sed -ri -e  s old string new string g    grep -Elr --binary-files without-match  old string    files dir     Credits for  hobs

User · Answer

Here is what I would do   find  path to dir -type f -iname   filename   -print0   xargs -0 sed -i   searchstring s old new g    this will look for all files containing filename in the file s name under the  path to dir  than for every file found  search for the line with searchstring and replace old with new   Though if you want to omit looking for a specific file with a filename string in the file s name  than simply do   find  path to dir -type f -print0   xargs -0 sed -i   searchstring s old new g    This will do the same thing above  but to all files found under  path to dir

User · Answer

You could even do it like this   Example  grep -rl  windows       xargs sed -i  s windows linux g    This will search for the string  windows  in all files relative to the current directory and replace  windows  with  linux  for each occurrence of the string in each file

User · Answer

This works best for me on OS X   grep -r -l  searchtext      sort   uniq   xargs perl -e  s matchtext replacetext   -pi   Source  http   www praj com au post 23691181208 grep-replace-text-string-in-files

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