Command line search and replace in all filenames matched by grep

Question

I m trying to search and replace a string in all files matched by grep  grep -n  foo    will give me output in the form   filename   line number   text   For each file returned by grep  I d like to modify the file by replacing foo with bar

User · Accepted Answer

Do you mean search and replace a string in all files matched by grep?

perl -p -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/g' `grep -ril searchpattern *`

Edit

Since this seems to be a fairly popular question thought I'd update.

Nowadays I mostly use ack-grep as it's more user-friendly. So the above command would be:

perl -p -i -e 's/old/new/g' `ack -l searchpattern`

To handle whitespace in file names you can run:

ack --print0 -l searchpattern | xargs -0 perl -p -i -e 's/old/new/g'

you can do more with ack-grep. Say you want to restrict the search to HTML files only:

ack --print0 --html -l searchpattern | xargs -0 perl -p -i -e 's/old/new/g'

And if white space is not an issue it's even shorter:

perl -p -i -e 's/old/new/g' `ack -l --html searchpattern`
perl -p -i -e 's/old/new/g' `ack -f --html` # will match all html files

User · Answer

I like and used the above solution or a system wide search and replace among thousands of files   find -name    htm   -print -exec sed -i bak  s foo bar g          I assume with the    htm   instead of  html it searches and finds  htm and  html files alike   I replace the  bak with the more system wide used tilde     to make clean up of backup files easier

User · Answer

This appears to be what you want  based on the example you gave   sed -i  s foo bar g      It is not recursive  it will not descend into subdirectories   For a nice solution replacing in selected files throughout a tree I would use find   find   -name    html  -print -exec sed -i bak  s foo bar g          The   html is the expression that files must match  the  bak after the -i makes a copy of the original file  with a  bak extension  it can be any extension you like  and the g at the end of the sed expression tells sed to replace multiple copies on one line  rather than only the first one   The -print to find is a convenience to show which files were being matched  All this depends on the exact versions of these tools on your system

User · Answer

If your sed 1  has a -i option  then use it like this   for i in    do   sed -i  s foo bar    i done   If not  there are several ways variations on the following depending on which language you want to play with   ruby -i bak -pe  sub  r foo    bar      perl -pi bak -e  s foo bar

User · Answer

This works using grep without needing to use perl or find   grep -rli  old-word      xargs -i  sed -i  s old-word new-word g

User · Answer

This appears to be what you want  based on the example you gave   sed -i  s foo bar g      It is not recursive  it will not descend into subdirectories   For a nice solution replacing in selected files throughout a tree I would use find   find   -name    html  -print -exec sed -i bak  s foo bar g          The   html is the expression that files must match  the  bak after the -i makes a copy of the original file  with a  bak extension  it can be any extension you like  and the g at the end of the sed expression tells sed to replace multiple copies on one line  rather than only the first one   The -print to find is a convenience to show which files were being matched  All this depends on the exact versions of these tools on your system

User · Answer

If your sed 1  has a -i option  then use it like this   for i in    do   sed -i  s foo bar    i done   If not  there are several ways variations on the following depending on which language you want to play with   ruby -i bak -pe  sub  r foo    bar      perl -pi bak -e  s foo bar

User · Answer

The answer already given of using find and sed  find -name    html  -print -exec sed -i bak  s foo bar g         is probably the standard answer  Or you could use perl -pi -e s foo bar g  instead of the sed command   For most quick uses  you may find the command rpl is easier to remember  Here is replacement  foo -  bar   recursively on all files in the current directory   rpl -R foo bar    It s not available by default on most Linux distros but is quick to install  apt-get install rpl or similar    However  for tougher jobs that involve regular expressions and back substitution  or file renames as well as search-and-replace  the most general and powerful tool I m aware of is repren  a small Python script I wrote a while back for some thornier renaming and refactoring tasks  The reasons you might prefer it are    Support renaming of files as well as search-and-replace on file contents  including moving files between directories and creating new parent directories   See changes before you commit to performing the search and replace  Support regular expressions with back substitution  whole words  case insensitive  and case preserving  replace foo -  bar  Foo -  Bar  FOO -  BAR  modes  Works with multiple replacements  including swaps  foo -  bar and bar -  foo  or sets of non-unique replacements  foo -  bar  f -  x     Check the README for examples

User · Answer

The answer already given of using find and sed  find -name    html  -print -exec sed -i bak  s foo bar g         is probably the standard answer  Or you could use perl -pi -e s foo bar g  instead of the sed command   For most quick uses  you may find the command rpl is easier to remember  Here is replacement  foo -  bar   recursively on all files in the current directory   rpl -R foo bar    It s not available by default on most Linux distros but is quick to install  apt-get install rpl or similar    However  for tougher jobs that involve regular expressions and back substitution  or file renames as well as search-and-replace  the most general and powerful tool I m aware of is repren  a small Python script I wrote a while back for some thornier renaming and refactoring tasks  The reasons you might prefer it are    Support renaming of files as well as search-and-replace on file contents  including moving files between directories and creating new parent directories   See changes before you commit to performing the search and replace  Support regular expressions with back substitution  whole words  case insensitive  and case preserving  replace foo -  bar  Foo -  Bar  FOO -  BAR  modes  Works with multiple replacements  including swaps  foo -  bar and bar -  foo  or sets of non-unique replacements  foo -  bar  f -  x     Check the README for examples

User · Answer

I like and used the above solution or a system wide search and replace among thousands of files   find -name    htm   -print -exec sed -i bak  s foo bar g          I assume with the    htm   instead of  html it searches and finds  htm and  html files alike   I replace the  bak with the more system wide used tilde     to make clean up of backup files easier

User · Answer

This works using grep without needing to use perl or find   grep -rli  old-word      xargs -i  sed -i  s old-word new-word g

User · Answer

If your sed 1  has a -i option  then use it like this   for i in    do   sed -i  s foo bar    i done   If not  there are several ways variations on the following depending on which language you want to play with   ruby -i bak -pe  sub  r foo    bar      perl -pi bak -e  s foo bar

User · Answer

If your sed 1  has a -i option  then use it like this   for i in    do   sed -i  s foo bar    i done   If not  there are several ways variations on the following depending on which language you want to play with   ruby -i bak -pe  sub  r foo    bar      perl -pi bak -e  s foo bar

User · Answer

This appears to be what you want  based on the example you gave   sed -i  s foo bar g      It is not recursive  it will not descend into subdirectories   For a nice solution replacing in selected files throughout a tree I would use find   find   -name    html  -print -exec sed -i bak  s foo bar g          The   html is the expression that files must match  the  bak after the -i makes a copy of the original file  with a  bak extension  it can be any extension you like  and the g at the end of the sed expression tells sed to replace multiple copies on one line  rather than only the first one   The -print to find is a convenience to show which files were being matched  All this depends on the exact versions of these tools on your system

User · Answer

This appears to be what you want  based on the example you gave   sed -i  s foo bar g      It is not recursive  it will not descend into subdirectories   For a nice solution replacing in selected files throughout a tree I would use find   find   -name    html  -print -exec sed -i bak  s foo bar g          The   html is the expression that files must match  the  bak after the -i makes a copy of the original file  with a  bak extension  it can be any extension you like  and the g at the end of the sed expression tells sed to replace multiple copies on one line  rather than only the first one   The -print to find is a convenience to show which files were being matched  All this depends on the exact versions of these tools on your system

User · Answer

This is actually easier than it seems   grep -Rl  foo       xargs -n 1 -I   sh -c  ls    sed -i  s foo bar g         grep recurses through your tree  -R  and prints just the file name  -l   starting at the current directory      that gets piped to xargs  which processes them one at a time  -n 1   and uses   as a placeholder  -I    in a shell command  sh -c  in the shell command  first the file name is printed  ls     then sed does an inline operation  -i   a substution  s    of foo with bar  foo bar   globally   g  on the file  again  represented by      Easy peasy   If you get a good grasp on find  grep  xargs  sed  and awk  almost nothing is impossible when it comes to text file manipulation in bash

User · Answer

find   -type f -print0   xargs -0  lt sed perl ruby cmd gt  will process multiple space contained file names at once loading one interpreter per batch  Much faster

User · Answer

This is actually easier than it seems   grep -Rl  foo       xargs -n 1 -I   sh -c  ls    sed -i  s foo bar g         grep recurses through your tree  -R  and prints just the file name  -l   starting at the current directory      that gets piped to xargs  which processes them one at a time  -n 1   and uses   as a placeholder  -I    in a shell command  sh -c  in the shell command  first the file name is printed  ls     then sed does an inline operation  -i   a substution  s    of foo with bar  foo bar   globally   g  on the file  again  represented by      Easy peasy   If you get a good grasp on find  grep  xargs  sed  and awk  almost nothing is impossible when it comes to text file manipulation in bash

User · Answer

find   -type f -print0   xargs -0  lt sed perl ruby cmd gt  will process multiple space contained file names at once loading one interpreter per batch  Much faster

[linux] Command line: search and replace in all filenames matched by grep

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