Ubuntu – Find and replace text in multiple files using Geany

geanysearchtext-editor

I'm looking for a method to find and replace text in hundreds of files.

I know that Geany can find text in multiple files. That's good.
But how do I replace the text?

Geany seems to do it only in the file that's currently opened. How do you open all files in Geany where it finds the search string?

Best Answer

You can do this by waiting for a plugin to appear in this sense, or by using the terminal. I think the second way is better for the moment. I will explain how.

To open all files, in which a specific string is found, from inside of a directory (and subdirectories) open Geany, select Terminal tab from Message Window and run next command inside:

grep -rHIF --exclude='/directory_path/*~' -- 'text_to_find' /bin/bash /directory_path/* | geany `awk 'BEGIN {FS="[:]"} {print $1}'`

For example, to open all bash scripts that I have in my /home/radu/bin directory with Geany, I run next command:

grep -rHIF --exclude='/home/radu/bin/*~' -- '#!/bin/bash' /home/radu/bin/* | geany `awk 'BEGIN {FS="[:]"} {print $1}'`

To open these files in a new instance of Geany without to load the previous session's files, use -is arguments for geany command:

grep -rHIF --exclude='/directory_path/*~' -- 'text_to_find' /bin/bash /directory_path/* | geany -is `awk 'BEGIN {FS="[:]"} {print $1}'`

Now that you have all the files that you need opened in a single session of Geany, press Ctrl+H to open the Replace dialog, insert the text to find, insert the text to replace and press In Session button:

Geany Search & Replace Dialog

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This simple python script should do the task:


#!/usr/bin/env python

# Syntax: multiline-replace.py input.txt search.txt replacement.txt

import sys

inp = open(sys.argv[1]).read()
needle = open(sys.argv[2]).read()
replacement = open(sys.argv[3]).read()

sys.stdout.write(inp.replace(needle,replacement))

Like most other solutions, it has the disadvantage that the whole file is slurped into memory at once. For small text files, it should work well enough, however.

Ubuntu – Find and replace text within multiple files

Here I use sed to replace every occurrence of the word "cybernetnews" with "cybernet" in every file with the extension, c, in the directory, /home/user/directory/.

find /home/user/directory -name \*.c -exec sed -i "s/cybernetnews/cybernet/g" {} \;

A more generic variation where you search recursively from the directory of execution and operate on only regular, readable, writeable files:

find ./ -type f -readable -writable -exec sed -i "s/cybernetnews/cybernet/g" {} \;

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