How can I do a recursive find/replace of a string with awk or sed?

Question

How do I find and replace every occurrence of:

subdomainA.example.com

with

subdomainB.example.com

in every text file under the /home/www/ directory tree recursively?

Answer 1

find /home/www \( -type d -name .git -prune \) -o -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

-print0 tells find to print each of the results separated by a null character, rather than a new line. In the unlikely event that your directory has files with newlines in the names, this still lets xargs work on the correct filenames.

\\( -type d -name .git -prune \\) is an expression which completely skips over all directories named .git . You could easily expand it, if you use SVN or have other folders you want to preserve -- just match against more names. It's roughly equivalent to -not -path .git , but more efficient, because rather than checking every file in the directory, it skips it entirely. The -o after it is required because of how -prune actually works.

For more information, see man find .

Answer 2

对我来说最简单的方法是

grep -rl oldtext . | xargs sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'

Answer 3

Note : Do not run this command on a folder including a git repo - changes to .git could corrupt your git index.

find /home/www/ -type f -exec \
    sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +

Compared to other answers here, this is simpler than most and uses sed instead of perl, which is what the original question asked for.

Answer 4

All the tricks are almost the same, but I like this one:

find <mydir> -type f -exec sed -i 's/<string1>/<string2>/g' {} +

• find <mydir> : look up in the directory.

• -type f :

  File is of type: regular file

• -exec command {} + :

  This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the selected files, but the command line is built by appending each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of the command will be much less than the number of matched files. The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of `{}' is allowed within the command. The command is executed in the starting directory.

Answer 5

For me the easiest solution to remember is https://stackoverflow.com/a/2113224/565525 , ie:

sed -i '' -e 's/subdomainA/subdomainB/g' $(find /home/www/ -type f)

NOTE : -i '' solves OSX problem sed: 1: "...": invalid command code .

NOTE : If there are too many files to process you'll get Argument list too long . The workaround - use find -exec or xargs solution described above.

Answer 6

cd /home/www && find . -type f -print0 |
  xargs -0 perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

Answer 7

For anyone using silver searcher ( ag )

ag SearchString -l0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/SearchString/Replacement/g'

Since ag ignores git/hg/svn file/folders by default, this is safe to run inside a repository.

Answer 8

An one nice oneliner as an extra. Using git grep.

git grep -lz 'subdomainA.example.com' | xargs -0 perl -i'' -pE "s/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g"

Answer 9

To cut down on files to recursively sed through, you could grep for your string instance:

grep -rl <oldstring> /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s^<oldstring>^<newstring>^g

If you run man grep you'll notice you can also define an --exlude-dir="*.git" flag if you want to omit searching through .git directories, avoiding git index issues as others have politely pointed out.

Leading you to:

grep -rl --exclude-dir="*.git" <oldstring> /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s^<oldstring>^<newstring>^g

Answer 10

This one is compatible with git repositories, and a bit simpler:

Linux:

git grep -l 'original_text' | xargs sed -i 's/original_text/new_text/g'

Mac:

git grep -l 'original_text' | xargs sed -i '' -e 's/original_text/new_text/g'

(Thanks to http://blog.jasonmeridth.com/posts/use-git-grep-to-replace-strings-in-files-in-your-git-repository/ )

Answer 11

find /home/www/ -type f -exec perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +

find /home/www/ -type f will list all files in /home/www/ (and its subdirectories). The "-exec" flag tells find to run the following command on each file found.

perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +

is the command run on the files (many at a time). The {} gets replaced by file names. The + at the end of the command tells find to build one command for many filenames.

Per the find man page: "The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds its command lines."

Thus it's possible to achieve your goal (and handle filenames containing spaces) without using xargs -0 , or -print0 .

Answer 12

如果您需要排除目录（ --exclude-dir=..folder ）并且可能有带空格的文件名（通过对grep -Z和xargs -0使用 0Byte 解决），这是一种直接的方法

grep -rlZ oldtext . --exclude-dir=.folder | xargs -0 sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'

Answer 13

Simplest way to replace ( all files, directory, recursive )

find . -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +

Note: Sometimes you might need to ignore some hidden files ie .git , you can use above command.

If you want to include hidden files use,

find . -type f  -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +

In both case the string foo will be replaced with new string bar

Answer 14

I just needed this and was not happy with the speed of the available examples. So I came up with my own:

cd /var/www && ack-grep -l --print0 subdomainA.example.com | xargs -0 perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

Ack-grep is very efficient on finding relevant files. This command replaced ~145 000 files with a breeze whereas others took so long I couldn't wait until they finish.

Answer 15

或使用极快的 GNU Parallel：

grep -rl oldtext . | parallel sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g' {}

Answer 16

grep -lr 'subdomainA.example.com' | while read file; do sed -i "s/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g" "$file"; done

I guess most people don't know that they can pipe something into a "while read file" and it avoids those nasty -print0 args, while presevering spaces in filenames.

Further adding an echo before the sed allows you to see what files will change before actually doing it.

Answer 17

You can use awk to solve this as below,

for file in `find /home/www -type f`
do
   awk '{gsub(/subdomainA.example.com/,"subdomainB.example.com"); print $0;}' $file > ./tempFile && mv ./tempFile $file;
done

hope this will help you !!!

Answer 18

#!/usr/local/bin/bash -x

find * /home/www -type f | while read files
do

sedtest=$(sed -n '/^/,/$/p' "${files}" | sed -n '/subdomainA/p')

    if [ "${sedtest}" ]
    then
    sed s'/subdomainA/subdomainB/'g "${files}" > "${files}".tmp
    mv "${files}".tmp "${files}"
    fi

done

Answer 19

尝试这个：

sed -i 's/subdomainA/subdomainB/g' `grep -ril 'subdomainA' *`

Answer 20

根据这篇博文：

find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/oldtext/newtext/g;'

Answer 21

If you do not mind using vim together with grep or find tools, you could follow up the answer given by user Gert in this link --> How to do a text replacement in a big folder hierarchy? .

Here's the deal:

• recursively grep for the string that you want to replace in a certain path, and take only the complete path of the matching file. (that would be the $(grep 'string' 'pathname' -Rl) .

• (optional) if you want to make a pre-backup of those files on centralized directory maybe you can use this also: cp -iv $(grep 'string' 'pathname' -Rl) 'centralized-directory-pathname'

• after that you can edit/replace at will in vim following a scheme similar to the one provided on the link given:

  • :bufdo %s#string#replacement#gc | update

Answer 22

A bit old school but this worked on OS X.

There are few trickeries:

• Will only edit files with extension .sls under the current directory

• . must be escaped to ensure sed does not evaluate them as "any character"

• , is used as the sed delimiter instead of the usual /

Also note this is to edit a Jinja template to pass a variable in the path of an import (but this is off topic).

First, verify your sed command does what you want (this will only print the changes to stdout, it will not change the files):

for file in $(find . -name *.sls -type f); do echo -e "\n$file: "; sed 's,foo\.bar,foo/bar/\"+baz+\"/,g' $file; done

Edit the sed command as needed, once you are ready to make changes:

for file in $(find . -name *.sls -type f); do echo -e "\n$file: "; sed -i '' 's,foo\.bar,foo/bar/\"+baz+\"/,g' $file; done

Note the -i '' in the sed command, I did not want to create a backup of the original files (as explained in In-place edits with sed on OS X or in Robert Lujo's comment in this page).

Happy seding folks!

Answer 23

just to avoid to change also

• NearlysubdomainA.example.com
• subdomainA.example.comp.other

but still

• subdomainA.example.com.IsIt.good

(maybe not good in the idea behind domain root)

find /home/www/ -type f -exec sed -i 's/\bsubdomainA\.example\.com\b/\1subdomainB.example.com\2/g' {} \;

Answer 24

I just use tops:

find . -name '*.[c|cc|cp|cpp|m|mm|h]' -print0 |  xargs -0 tops -verbose  replace "verify_noerr(<b args>)" with "__Verify_noErr(<args>)" \
replace "check(<b args>)" with "__Check(<args>)" 

Answer 25

Here's a version that should be more general than most; it doesn't require find (using du instead), for instance. It does require xargs , which are only found in some versions of Plan 9 (like 9front).

 du -a | awk -F' '  '{ print $2 }' | xargs sed -i -e 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

If you want to add filters like file extensions use grep :

 du -a | grep "\.scala$" | awk -F' '  '{ print $2 }' | xargs sed -i -e 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

Answer 26

to change multiple files (and saving a backup as *.bak ):

perl -p -i -e "s/\|/x/g" *

will take all files in directory and replace | with x called a “Perl pie” (easy as a pie)

Answer 27

For Qshell (qsh) on IBMi, not bash as tagged by OP.

Limitations of qsh commands:

• find does not have the -print0 option
• xargs does not have -0 option
• sed does not have -i option

Thus the solution in qsh:

    PATH='your/path/here'
    SEARCH=\'subdomainA.example.com\'
    REPLACE=\'subdomainB.example.com\'

    for file in $( find ${PATH} -P -type f ); do

            TEMP_FILE=${file}.${RANDOM}.temp_file

            if [ ! -e ${TEMP_FILE} ]; then
                    touch -C 819 ${TEMP_FILE}

                    sed -e 's/'$SEARCH'/'$REPLACE'/g' \
                    < ${file} > ${TEMP_FILE}

                    mv ${TEMP_FILE} ${file}
            fi
    done

Caveats:

• Solution excludes error handling
• Not Bash as tagged by OP

Answer 28

如果您想在不完全破坏您的 SVN 存储库的情况下使用它，您可以通过执行以下操作告诉“查找”忽略所有隐藏文件：

find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

Answer 29

Using combination of grep and sed

for pp in $(grep -Rl looking_for_string)
do
    sed -i 's/looking_for_string/something_other/g' "${pp}"
done

Answer 30

For replace all occurrences in a git repository you can use:

git ls-files -z | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

See List files in local git repo? for other options to list all files in a repository. The -z options tells git to separate the file names with a zero byte, which assures that xargs (with the option -0 ) can separate filenames, even if they contain spaces or whatnot.

Answer 31

perl -p -i -e 's/oldthing/new_thingy/g' `grep -ril oldthing *`

Answer 32

一种更简单的方法是在命令行上使用以下内容

find /home/www/ -type f|xargs perl -pi -e 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' 

Answer 33

This is the best all around solution I've found for OSX and Windows (msys2). Should work with anything that can get the gnu version of sed. Skips the .git directories so it won't corrupt your checksums.

On mac, just install coreutils first and ensure gsed is in the path -

brew install coreutils

Then I stick this function in my zshrc/bashrc ->

replace-recursive() {
    hash gsed 2>/dev/null && local SED_CMD="gsed" || SED_CMD="sed"
    find . -type f -name "*.*" -not -path "*/.git/*" -print0 | xargs -0 $SED_CMD -i "s/$1/$2/g"
}

usage: replace-recursive <find> <replace>

Answer 34

To replace all content matching string_1 with string_2 of all .c and .h files in the current directory and subdirectories (excluding .git/) .

This works on Mac :

find . -type f -path "*.git*" -prune -o -name '*\.[ch]' -exec \
sed -i '' -e 's/'$1'/'$2'/g' {} +

This should work on Linux (Have not tested yet):

find . -type f -path "*.git*" -prune -o -name '*\.[ch]' -exec \
sed -i 's/string_1/string_2/g' {} +

Answer 35

如果您有权访问节点，则可以执行npm install -g rexreplace然后

rexreplace 'subdomainA.example.com' 'subdomainB.example.com' /home/www/**/*.*

Answer 36

Replacing find(1) with the simpler fd(1) / fdfind = https://github.com/sharkdp/fd :

fdfind . --type f --exec sed -i "s/original_string/new_string/g"

Addressing fd(1) iconsistent pkg & cmd names

• on macOS homebrew: pkg and cmd = fd
• on Ubuntu 20.04: pkg = fd-find , cmd = fdfind

I make an alias fdfind='fd' on macOS for consistent cmd naming (between my macOS and Linux platforms).

More on this point at https://github.com/sharkdp/fd/issues/1009 .

More details and additional features

# bash examples:

1='original_string'
2='new______string'

# for this (the original-poster's) question:
1='subdomainA.example.com'
2='subdomainB.example.com'

# 'fdfind' (on at least Ubuntu 20.04) = 'fd' = https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

fdfind . --type f --exec sed -i "s/$1/$2/g"

# Here's a slightly-more-complex example that
# a. excludes (-E) .git/ and archive/ dirs, and
# b. performs a word-boundary search on the original_string (\<$1\>):
fdfind . -E .git/ -E archive/ --type f --exec sed -i "s/\<$1\>/$2/g"

Even fancier: controlling the word-boundary-ness from the third ( $3 ) command-line paramter (third parameter = noword means no boundary, leftword means only left-side word boundary, rightword means only right-side boundary):

#!/usr/bin/env bash

#
# replace-tree.bash
#

# 'fdfind' (on at least Ubuntu 20.04) = 'fd' = https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

if [ $# -lt 2 ]; then
  echo "$0: Please provide at least 2 arguments."
  exit 1
fi

original="\<$1\>"

if   [ "$3" = "noword" ];    then
  original="$1"
elif [ "$3" = "leftword" ];  then
  original="\<$1"
elif [ "$3" = "rightword" ]; then
  original="$1\>"
fi

fdfind . --type f --exec sed -i "s/$original/$2/g"

Example usage:

$ replace-tree.bash original_string new_string leftword
$

Answer 37

I'm surprised I've not seen the simple answer using file globbing, which I just used to scan/update ONLY packge.json files with **/package.json

this was macos specific under zsh

cd /home/www
sed -i '' -e 's/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainA.example.com/g' **/*