How to find and replace all occurrences of a string recursively in a directory tree

Question

Using just grep and sed  how do I replace all occurrences of    a example com   with  b example com   within a text file under the  home user  directory tree recursively finding and replacing all occurrences in all files in sub-directories as well

User · Answer

Try this    find  home user  -type f   xargs sed -i   s a  example  com b example com g    In case you want to ignore dot directories   find        -regex              -type f   xargs sed -i  s a  example  com b example com g    Edit  escaped dots in search expression

User · Answer

The command below will search all the files recursively whose name matches the search pattern and will replace the string   find  path to searchdir  -name  serachpatter  -type f   xargs sed -i   s stringone StrIngTwo g   Also if you want to limit the depth of recursion you can put the limits as well   find  path to searchdir  -name  serachpatter  -type f -maxdepth 4 -mindepth 2   xargs sed -i   s stringone StrIngTwo g

User · Answer

On macOS  none of the answers worked for me  I discovered that was due to differences in how sed works on macOS and other BSD systems compared to GNU  In particular BSD sed takes the -i option but requires a suffix for the backup  but an empty suffix is permitted  grep version from this answer  grep -rl  foo       LC ALL C xargs sed -i     s foo bar g   find version from this answer  find        -regex              -type f   LC ALL C xargs sed -i     s foo bar g   Don t omit the Regex to ignore   folders if you re in a Git repo  I realized that the hard way  That LC ALL C option is to avoid getting sed  RE error  illegal byte sequence if sed finds a byte sequence that is not a valid UTF-8 character  That s another difference between BSD and GNU  Depending on the kind of files you are dealing with  you may not need it  For some reason that is not clear to me  the grep version found more occurrences than the find one  which is why I recommend to use grep

User · Answer

Try this command    home user  directory - find    -type f   -exec sed -i -e  s a example com b example com g

User · Answer

it is much simpler than that   for i in  find      do sed -i --  s search string target string g   i  done   find i    will iterate over all the files in the folder and in subfolders   sed -i     will replace in the files the relevant string if exists

User · Answer

Try this   grep -rl  SearchString       xargs sed -i  s REPLACESTRING WITHTHIS g    grep -rl will recursively search for the SEARCHSTRING in the directories    and will replace the strings using sed   Ex   Replacing a name TOM with JERRY using search string as SWATKATS in directory CARTOONNETWORK  grep -rl  SWATKATS  CARTOONNETWORK    xargs sed -i  s TOM JERRY g    This will replace TOM with JERRY in all the files and subdirectories under CARTOONNETWORK wherever it finds the string SWATKATS

User · Answer

I know this is a really old question  but       vehomzzz s answer uses find and xargs when the questions says explicitly grep and sed only   EmployedRussian and  BrooksMoses tried to say it was a dup of awk and sed  but it s not - again  the question explicitly says grep and sed only    So here is my solution  assuming you are using Bash as your shell   OLDIFS  IFS IFS    n  for f in  grep -rl a example com      Use -irl instead of -rl for case insensitive search do     sed -i  s a  example  com b example com g   f   Use  gi instead of  g for case insensitive search done IFS  OLDIFS   If you are using a different shell  such as Unix SHell  let me know and I will try to find a syntax adjustment   P S   Here s a one-liner   OLDIFS  IFS IFS    n  for f in  grep -rl a example com    do sed -i  s a  example  com b example com g   f done IFS  OLDIFS   Sources    Bash  Iterating over lines in a variable grep 1  - Linux man page Official Grep Manual sed 1  - Linux man page Official sed Manual

User · Answer

For me works the next command   find  path to dir -name  file txt    xargs sed -i  s string to replace new string g    if string contains slash  path to dir  it can be replace with another character to separate  like     instead       For example    s string to replace new string g

[sed] How to find and replace all occurrences of a string recursively in a directory tree?

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