Find a string and replace in all files inside a directory and sub-directory

Question

I am thinking to replace a string in linux, the idea is to find all files having abc as string and replace with xyz inside a directory and all sub-directories.

Can you suggest how can I do this with Linux shell scripting

Answer 1

You can use find and sed, since sed will only affect files which have this string. If a file does not have the string, there's no disadvantage of running the replace anyway:

find -type f -exec sed -i 's/abc/xyzg' {} +

• -type f only find files (exclude directories)
• -exec for each file found execute …
• sed -i edit files in-place
• s/abc/xyz/g replace all occurrences of "abc" with "xyz" in all lines
• {} + invoke the "exec" command with multiple file names at once, instead of once per file