Recursive search and replace in text files on Mac and Linux

Question

In the linux shell  the following command will recursively search and replace all instances of  this  with  that   I don t have a Linux shell in front of me  but it should do    find   -name    txt  -print   xargs sed -i  s this that g    What will a similar command on OSX look like

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This is my workable one  on mac OS X 10 10 4  grep -e  this  -rl     xargs sed -i     s this that g    The above ones use find will change the files that do not contain the search text  add a new line at the file end   which is verbose

User · Answer

None of the above work on OSX   Do the following   perl -pi -w -e  s SEARCH FOR REPLACE WITH g     txt

User · Answer

could just say  PWD instead of

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https   bitbucket org masonicboom serp is a go utility  i e  cross-platform   tested on OSX  that does recursive search-and-replace for text in files within a given directory  and confirms each replacement  It s new  so might be buggy   Usage looks like     ls test a  d  d2 z   cat test z hi     serp --root test --search hi --replace bye --pattern                              test z  replace hi with bye   y  n   y   cat test z bye

User · Answer

find   -type f   xargs sed -i     s string1 string2 g    Refer here for more info

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On Mac OSX 10 11 5 this works fine   grep -rli  old-word      xargs -I  sed -i     s old-word new-word g

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I used this format - but   I found I had to run it three or more times to get it to actually change every instance which I found extremely strange   Running it once would change some in each file but not all  Running exactly the same string two-four times would catch all instances   find   -type f -name    txt  -exec sed -i    s thistext newtext

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Whenever I type this command I always seem to hose it up  or forget a flag  I created a Gist on github based off of TaylanUB s answer that does a global find replace from the current directory  This is Mac OSX specific   https   gist github com nateflink 9056302  It s nice because now I just pop open a terminal then copy in   curl -s https   gist github com nateflink 9056302 raw findreplaceosx sh   bash -s  find-a-url com   replace-a-url com   You can get some weird byte sequence errors  so here is the full code      bin bash  By Nate Flink   Invoke on the terminal like this  curl -s https   gist github com nateflink 9056302 raw findreplaceosx sh   bash -s  find-a-url com   replace-a-url com   if   -z   1         -z   2     then   echo  Usage     0  find string   replace string     exit 1 fi  FIND  1 REPLACE  2   needed for byte sequence error in ascii to utf conversion on OSX export LC CTYPE C  export LANG C    sed -i    is needed by the osx version of sed  instead of sed -i  find   -type f -exec sed -i     s   FIND    REPLACE  g       exit 0

User · Answer

OS X uses a mix of BSD and GNU tools  so best always check the documentation  although I had it that less didn t even conform to the OS X manpage     https   web archive org web 20170808213955 https   developer apple com legacy library documentation Darwin Reference ManPages man1 sed 1 html  sed takes the argument after -i as the extension for backups  Provide an empty string  -i     for no backups   The following should do   LC ALL C find   -type f -name    txt  -exec sed -i    s this that        The -type f is just good practice  sed will complain if you give it a directory or so  -exec is preferred over xargs  you needn t bother with -print0 or anything  The      at the end means that find will append all results as arguments to one instance of the called command  instead of re-running it for each result   One exception is when the maximal number of command-line arguments allowed by the OS is breached  in that case find will run more than one instance

User · Answer

The command on OSX should be exactly the same as it is Unix under the pretty UI

User · Answer

For the mac  a more similar approach would be this   find   -name    txt  -print0   xargs -0 sed -i     s form forms g

User · Answer

A version that works on both Linux and Mac OS X  by adding the -e switch to sed    export LC CTYPE C LANG C find   -name    txt  -print0   xargs -0 sed -i -e  s this that g

User · Answer

As an alternative solution  I m using this one on Mac OSX 10 7 5  grep -ilr  old-word      xargs -I  sed -i     s old-word new-word g      Credit goes to  Todd Cesere s answer

User · Answer

If you are using a zsh terminal you re able to use wildcard magic   sed -i     s search high-replace g    txt

[linux] Recursive search and replace in text files on Mac and Linux

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