使用grep和sed替换字符串

Question

I have bunch of files in a directory, I need to change prefix of lines in file like "AB_" to "YZ_" how can i do it?

i have used grep and sed like,

grep -nr "AB_" ./ | xargs -0 sed -i 's/AB_/YZ_/g'

but giving error, : File name too long

example string in a file are: Hello AB_WORLD! and Hello WORLD_AB!

Thanks.

Answer 1

You mean grep -lr not grep -nr

-l gives you the file name; -n gives you the matching line with line number prepended

Answer 2

I like Perl for this one:
The -i option will save the original file with a.bak extension.

$ perl -i.bak -pe 's/^AB_/YZ_/' *.txt

Answer 3

grep -lr "AB_" ./ | while read file
do
  echo "Change file $file ..."
  sed -i 's/AB_/YZ_/g' ${file}
done

Answer 4

sed will take multiple files as arguments, so this should work:

sed -i '/AB_/s//YZ_/g' *

(Note that -i is non-standard)

Answer 5

sed one-liner answer

Find php files in the directory containing string "foo" and replace all occurences with "bar"

grep -l foo *.php | xargs sed -i '' s/foo/bar/g

To recurse through directories

grep -rl foo * | xargs sed -i '' s/foo/bar/g

(just done successfully on 8100 files)

grep -rl bar * | wc -l 8102

Answer 6

To replace every occurrence of a certain word / string in a ton of files spanning multiple directories, and this is the quickest way I've found to do it. It uses grep to search for a certain word and if it find its it runs sed to replace the strings you want.

grep -rl matchstring somedir/ | xargs sed -i 's/string1/string2/g'