Mass text replace in multiple files with Sed

I came across a neat method of replacing a string in loads ‘o’ files today.
Basically pipe the output of grep for your search string into sed doing a regex replace on the string.

grep -lre 'SEARCH_STRING' . | xargs -d'\n' sed -i "s/SEARCH_STRING/REPLACE_STRING/g"

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Mass text replace in multiple files with Sed”

Davide says:

July 15, 2009 at 5:24 pm

…which is basically the same as doing

find . -type f -exec grep -q ‘SEARCH_STRING’ -exec sed -i ’s/SEARCH_STRING/REPLACE_STRING/g’ {} \;

…which in turn is the same as

find . -type f -exec sed -i ’s/SEARCH_STRING/REPLACE_STRING/g’ {} +
Mark says:

July 18, 2009 at 7:17 pm

Nice, I actually like the last one you said - shorter

Random musings of a Geek

Mass text replace in multiple files with Sed

2 Responses to “Mass text replace in multiple files with Sed”

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