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Using a shell like bash or zshell, how can I do a recursive 'find and replace'? In other words, I want to replace every occurrence of 'foo' with 'bar' in all files in this directory and its subdirectories.
92
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Using a shell like bash or zshell, how can I do a recursive 'find and replace'? In other words, I want to replace every occurrence of 'foo' with 'bar' in all files in this directory and its subdirectories.
116
This command will do it (tested on both Mac OS X Lion and Kubuntu Linux).
# Recursively find and replace in files
find . -type f -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/foo/bar/g'
Here's how it works:
find . -type f -name '*.txt'
finds, in the current directory (.
) and below, all regular files (-type f
) whose names end in .txt
|
passes the output of that command (a list of filenames) to the next commandxargs
gathers up those filenames and hands them one by one to sed
sed -i '' -e 's/foo/bar/g'
means "edit the file in place, without a backup, and make the following substitution (s/foo/bar
) multiple times per line (/g
)" (see man sed
)Note that the 'without a backup' part in line 4 is OK for me, because the files I'm changing are under version control anyway, so I can easily undo if there was a mistake.
To avoid having to remember this, I use an interactive bash script, as follows:
#!/bin/bash
# find_and_replace.sh
echo "Find and replace in current directory!"
echo "File pattern to look for? (eg '*.txt')"
read filepattern
echo "Existing string?"
read existing
echo "Replacement string?"
read replacement
echo "Replacing all occurences of $existing with $replacement in files matching $filepattern"
find . -type f -name $filepattern -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e "s/$existing/$replacement/g"
4What is the meaning of ''
after the sed -i
what is the ''
role? – Jas – 2015-07-28T15:06:14.423
1@Jas: -i
with sed
means perform an in-place edit and ''
(empty string) means don't create backups. If you did sed -i '.bak'
the original files would be preserved with a .bak
extension. – Michael Thompson – 2015-12-03T15:30:26.703
what does -print0
do? – Jas – 2016-09-05T11:33:17.897
I don't like this solution, as for me, it 'touches' every .txt file and bumps the file modification time, even if no changes are made... – daryl – 2016-11-22T19:03:55.673
1sed: can't read : No such file or directory
– Karl Morrison – 2019-06-28T09:00:58.473
I am getting following error: sed: can't read : No such file or directory
– alper – 2020-02-27T11:12:09.747
11Never ever pipe find output to xargs without the -print0
option. Your command will fail on files with spaces etc. in their name. – slhck – 2012-05-24T23:16:58.107
Why do you need sed -i '' -e 's/foo/bar/g'
? Doesn't sed -i 's/foo/bar/g'
do the same thing? – Daniel Andersson – 2012-05-25T07:19:32.573
20Also, just find -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
will do all this with GNU find. – Daniel Andersson – 2012-05-25T07:20:31.183
@DanielAndersson - I seem to be getting different results on my work Mac and home Ubuntu machines, so I need to do some more tinkering before I update this answer. One note, though: the find... -exec
method is interesting, but man find
says to use '-execdir' instead for security reasons. – Nathan Long – 2012-05-25T13:11:05.797
Yeah, I've read that remark on -execdir
in the manual, but I have never been or heard of anyone who has been bitten, so until then I stay with -exec
:-) . That you get different results on Mac OS X and Ubuntu is because Mac OS X does not come with GNU find
as standard, and -exec +
and the omission of the path are GNU find
specific extensions. Perhaps the same could explain some sed
discrepancies between the systems. – Daniel Andersson – 2012-05-25T16:28:25.143
@DanielAndersson - It appears that you're correct; my Linux box can do the find... -exec
version, but my Mac can't. sed - 's/foo/bar/g'
does not work; -i
is to provide a backup file extension, and giving it an empty string means 'don't back up.' The command in my answer works on both platforms. – Nathan Long – 2012-06-01T19:34:55.473
7I get sed: can't read : No such file or directory
when I run find . -name '*.md' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/ä/ä/g'
, but find . -name '*.md' -print0
gives a list of many files. – Martin Thoma – 2014-01-30T11:00:02.640
9This works for me if I remove the space between the -i
and the ''
– Canadian Luke – 2014-06-02T19:49:47.157
30
find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec sed -i'' -e 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
This removes the xargs
dependency.
1The accepted answers does a better job of explaining it. but +1 for using the correct syntax. – orodbhen – 2016-11-18T17:10:21.480
4This does not work with GNU sed
, so will fail on most systems. GNU sed
requires you to put no space between -i
and ''
. – slhck – 2013-01-16T09:59:11.297
10
If you're using Git then you can do this:
git grep -lz foo | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/foo/bar/g'
-l
lists only filenames. -z
prints a null byte after each result.
I ended up doing this because some files in a project did not have a newline at the end of the file, and sed added a newline even when it made no other changes. (No comment on whether or not files should have a newline at the end. )
1Big +1 for this solution. The rest of the find ... -print0 | xargs -0 sed ...
solutions not only take a lot longer but also add newlines to files that don't have one already, which is a nuisance when working inside a git repo. git grep
is lighting fast by comparison. – Josh Kupershmidt – 2016-09-30T19:56:14.313
3
Here's my zsh/perl function I use for this:
change () {
from=$1
shift
to=$1
shift
for file in $*
do
perl -i.bak -p -e "s{$from}{$to}g;" $file
echo "Changing $from to $to in $file"
done
}
And I'd execute it using
$ change foo bar **/*.java
(for example)
3
Try:
sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' $(find . -type f)
Tested on Ubuntu 12.04.
This command will NOT work if subdirectory names and/or filenames contain spaces, but if you do have them don't use this command as it won't work.
It is generally a bad practice to use spaces in directory names and filenames.
http://linuxcommand.org/lc3_lts0020.php
Look at "Important facts about file names"
Try it when you have file(s) with space(s) in their names. (There's a rule of thumb that says, "If something seems too good to be true, it probably is." If you have "discovered" a solution that's more compact than anything anybody else has posted in 3½ years, you should ask yourself why that might be.) – Scott – 2015-11-08T06:43:45.827
1
I now use this shell script, which combines things I learned from the other answers and from searching the web. I placed it in a file called change
in a folder on my $PATH
and did chmod +x change
.
#!/bin/bash
function err_echo {
>&2 echo "$1"
}
function usage {
err_echo "usage:"
err_echo ' change old new foo.txt'
err_echo ' change old new foo.txt *.html'
err_echo ' change old new **\*.txt'
exit 1
}
[ $# -eq 0 ] && err_echo "No args given" && usage
old_val=$1
shift
new_val=$1
shift
files=$* # the rest of the arguments
[ -z "$old_val" ] && err_echo "No old value given" && usage
[ -z "$new_val" ] && err_echo "No new value given" && usage
[ -z "$files" ] && err_echo "No filenames given" && usage
for file in $files; do
sed -i '' -e "s/$old_val/$new_val/g" $file
done
0
# Recursively find and replace in files
find . -type f -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/foo/bar/g'
The above worked like a charm, but with linked directories, I've to add -L
flag to it. The final version looks like:
# Recursively find and replace in files
find -L . -type f -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/foo/bar/g'
0
My use case was I wanted to replace
foo:/Drive_Letter
with foo:/bar/baz/xyz
In my case I was able to do it with the following code.
I was in the same directory location where there were bulk of files.
find . -name "*.library" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/foo:\/Drive_Letter:/foo:\/bar\/baz\/xyz/g'
hope that helped.
0
The following command worked fine on Ubuntu and CentOS; however, under OS X I kept getting errors:
find . -name Root -exec sed -i 's/1.2.3.4\/home/foo.com\/mnt/' {} \;
sed: 1: "./Root": invalid command code .
When I tried passing the params via xargs it worked fine with no errors:
find . -name Root -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/1.2.3.4\/home/foo.com\/mnt/'
The fact that you changed -i
to -i ''
is probably more relevant than the fact that you changed -exec
to -print0 | xargs -0
. BTW, you probably don't need the -e
. – Scott – 2015-11-08T06:36:35.867
Related: Awk/Sed: How to do a recursive find/replace of a string?
– AlikElzin-kilaka – 2016-07-14T05:45:21.863It might be a good idea to try this in vim. That way you can use the confirmation feature to make sure you don't swap something you don't intend to. I am not sure if it can be done directory wide. – Samy Bencherif – 2019-07-19T01:47:09.497
An alternative answer for the same questions can be found here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9704020/recursive-search-and-replace-on-mac-and-linux
– dunxd – 2013-02-13T12:00:52.890