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?
If you are using a zsh terminal you're able to use wildcard magic:
sed -i "" "s/search/high-replace/g" *.txt
could just say $PWD instead of "."
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/ {} +
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
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
On Mac OSX 10.11.5 this works fine:
grep -rli 'old-word' * | xargs -I@ sed -i '' 's/old-word/new-word/g' @
None of the above work on OSX.
Do the following:
perl -pi -w -e 's/SEARCH_FOR/REPLACE_WITH/g;' *.txt
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
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.
find . -type f | xargs sed -i '' 's/string1/string2/g'
Refer here for more info.
For the mac, a more similar approach would be this:
find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "" "s/form/forms/g"
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'
The command on OSX should be exactly the same as it is Unix under the pretty UI.
Source: Stackoverflow.com