Linux – recursively replace every instance of a word in a directory from linux command line

find and replacelinuxrecursive

I have a directory with several subdirectories that all contain text files. In these text files, there is a certain word that occurs over and over again, and I want to replace every instance.

My Question – How would I accomplish this from a linux commandline? I don't want to gedit every file and do a manual search/replace.

(For a bonus – is there a way to do this in a case-insensitive way?)

Best Answer

You could use find and perl (via xargs):

find /target/directory -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/stringtoreplace/replacement/g'

or if you are already in the right directory

find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/stringtoreplace/replacement/g'

and if you only want to replace in, say, html files:

find . -type f -name '*html' | xargs perl -pi -e 's/stringtoreplace/replacement/g'

You don't have to use perl of course, any tool that performs search and replace operations will do, and not doubt there are several available that are less resource hungry than starting perl (which is this case is a sledge-hammer to crack a nut, but it is an example I've had stored for ages and I've no reason to find a more efficient version). My original source for the "trick" is http://oreilly.com/pub/h/73

You can use all the options in which-ever tool you choose, so in this case the full power of Perl's regular expressions. The page linked to above has more examples, including how to search in a case in-sensitive manner.

Related Solutions

How to Perform Recursive Find and Replace from the Command Line

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 command
xargs 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"

Linux command: find files and run command on them

You can use the -exec flag to execute a command on each matching file:

$ find ./ -type f -name "*.txt" -exec gedit "{}" \;

Syntax

The syntax is a bit strange (see -exec command ; in the manpages for more):

The string `{}' is replaced by the current file name being processed

You may also want to consider -execdir, which will do the same, but executes the command from the subdirectory containing the matched file (this is generally preferable).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to Perform Recursive Find and Replace from the Command Line

Linux command: find files and run command on them

Syntax

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