I'm using sed in this way.
find . -type f -exec sed -i "s/$3/$4/g" {} +
but it changes the dates of all files even if it does not find the string in a file.
Can I avoid it?
You can first grep your file, to see if there is something to replace:
find . -type f -exec grep -q "$3" '{}' ';' -exec sed -i "s/$3/$4/g" '{}' ';'
Otherwise it is not possible to avoid the timestamp update, as sed basically re-creates the file, when -i is used:
--in-place[=SUFFIX]
This option specifies that files are to be edited in-place. GNU sed does this by creating a temporary file and sending output to this file rather than to the standard output.
When the end of the file is reached, the temporary file is renamed to the output file’s original name.
GNU sed Manual
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?
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.
The simplest way for me is
grep -rl oldtext . | xargs sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'
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.
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.
For me the easiest solution to remember is https://stackoverflow.com/a/2113224/565525, i.e.:
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.
cd /home/www && find . -type f -print0 |
xargs -0 perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
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.
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/)
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
A straight forward method if you need to exclude directories (--exclude-dir=..folder) and also might have file names with spaces (solved by using 0Byte for both grep -Z and xargs -0)
grep -rlZ oldtext . --exclude-dir=.folder | xargs -0 sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'
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"
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 i.e. .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
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.
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.
or use the blazing fast GNU Parallel:
grep -rl oldtext . | parallel sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g' {}
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.
Try this:
sed -i 's/subdomainA/subdomainB/g' `grep -ril 'subdomainA' *`
According to this blog post:
find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/oldtext/newtext/g;'
#!/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
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
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 !!!
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.
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!
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' {} \;
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'
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
If you wanted to use this without completely destroying your SVN repository, you can tell 'find' to ignore all hidden files by doing:
find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
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
perl -p -i -e 's/oldthing/new_thingy/g' `grep -ril oldthing *`
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)
I have to do a sed line (also using pipes in Linux) to change a file extension, so I can do some kind of mv *.1stextension *.2ndextension like mv *.txt *.c. The thing is that I can't use batch or a for loop, so I have to do it all with pipes and sed command.
you can use string manipulation
filename="file.ext1"
mv "${filename}" "${filename/%ext1/ext2}"
Or if your system support, you can use rename.
Update
you can also do something like this
mv ${filename}{ext1,ext2}
which is called brace expansion
sed is for manipulating the contents of files, not the filename itself. My suggestion:
rename 's/\.ext/\.newext/' ./*.ext
Or, there's this existing question which should help.
This may work:
find . -name "*.txt" |
sed -e 's|./||g' |
awk '{print "mv",$1, $1"c"}' |
sed -e "s|\.txtc|\.c|g" > table;
chmod u+x table;
./table
I don't know why you can't use a loop. It makes life much easier :
newex="c"; # Give your new extension
for file in *.*; # You can replace with *.txt instead of *.*
do
ex="${file##*.}"; # This retrieves the file extension
ne=$(echo "$file" | sed -e "s|$ex|$newex|g"); # Replaces current with the new one
echo "$ex";echo "$ne";
mv "$file" "$ne";
done
You can use find to find all of the files and then pipe that into a while read loop:
$ find . -name "*.ext1" -print0 | while read -d $'\0' file
do
mv $file "${file%.*}.ext2"
done
The ${file%.*} is the small right pattern filter. The % marks the pattern to remove from the right side (matching the smallest glob pattern possible), The .* is the pattern (the last . followed by the characters after the .).
The -print0 will separate file names with the NUL character instead of \n. The -d $'\0' will read in file names separated by the NUL character. This way, file names with spaces, tabs, \n, or other wacky characters will be processed correctly.
You may try following options
Option 1 find along with rename
find . -type f -name "*.ext1" -exec rename -f 's/\.ext1$/ext2/' {} \;
Option 2 find along with mv
find . -type f -name "*.ext1" -exec sh -c 'mv -f $0 ${0%.ext1}.ext2' {} \;
Note: It is observed that rename doesn't work for many terminals
Another solution only with sed and sh
printf "%s\n" *.ext1 |
sed "s/'/'\\\\''/g"';s/\(.*\)'ext1'/mv '\''\1'ext1\'' '\''\1'ext2\''/g' |
sh
for better performance: only one process created
perl -le '($e,$f)=#ARGV;map{$o=$_;s/$e$/$f/;rename$o,$_}<*.$e>' ext2 ext3
well this should work
mv $file $(echo $file | sed -E -e 's/.xml.bak.*/.xml/g' | sed -E -e 's/.\///g')
output
abc.xml.bak.foobar -> abc.xml
How do I replace every occurrence of a string with another string below my current directory?
Example: I want to replace every occurrence of www.fubar.com with www.fubar.ftw.com in every file under my current directory.
From research so far I have come up with
sed -i 's/www.fubar.com/www.fubar.ftw.com/g' *.php
You're on the right track, use find to locate the files, then sed to edit them, for example:
find . -name '*.php' -exec sed -i -e 's/www.fubar.com/www.fubar.ftw.com/g' {} \;
Notes
The . means current directory - i.e. in this case, search in and below the current directory.
For some versions of sed you need to specify an extension for the -i option, which is used for backup files.
The -exec option is followed by the command to be applied to the files found, and is terminated by a semicolon, which must be escaped, otherwise the shell consumes it before it is passed to find.
Solution using find, args and sed:
find . -name '*.php' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/www.fubar.com/www.fubar.ftw.com/g'
A pure bash solution
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nullglob
for file in *.php
do
while read -r line
do
echo "${line/www.fubar.com/www.fubar.ftw.com}"
done < "$file" > tempo && mv tempo "$file"
done
A more efficient * alternative to the currently accepted solution:
`grep "www.fubar.com" . -lr | xargs sed -i 's/www.fubar.com/www.fubar.ftw.com/g'
This avoids the inefficiency of the find . -exec method, which needlessly runs a sed in-place replacement over all files below your current directory regardless of if they contain the string you're looking for or not, by instead using grep -lr. This gets just the files containing the string you want to replace which you can then pipe to xargs sed -i to perform the in-place replacement on just those files.
* : I used time to make a cursory comparison of my method with the accepted solution (adapted for my own use case); The find . -exec-style method took 3.624s to run on my machine and my above proposed solution took 0.156s, so roughly 23x faster for my use case.
If there are no subfolders, a simpler to remember way is
replace "www.fubar.com" "www.fubar.ftw.com" -- *
where * can also be a list of files
from the manual:
Invoke replace in one of the following ways:
shell> replace from to [from to] ... -- file_name [file_name] ...
shell> replace from to [from to] ... < file_name
If you have hidden files with a dot you can add those to * with
shopt -s dotglob
If you only have one depth of subfolders you can use */* instead of *
replace "www.fubar.com" "www.fubar.ftw.com" -- */*
When using ZSH as your shell you can do:
sed -i 's/www.fubar.com/www.fubar.ftw.com/g' **/*.php
I run this command to find and replace all occurrences of 'apple' with 'orange' in all files in root of my site:
find ./ -exec sed -i 's/apple/orange/g' {} \;
But it doesn't go through sub directories.
What is wrong with this command?
Here are some lines of output of find ./:
./index.php
./header.php
./fpd
./fpd/font
./fpd/font/desktop.ini
./fpd/font/courier.php
./fpd/font/symbol.php
Your find should look like that to avoid sending directory names to sed:
find ./ -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/apple/orange/g' {} \;
For larger s&r tasks it's better and faster to use grep and xargs, so, for example;
grep -rl 'apples' /dir_to_search_under | xargs sed -i 's/apples/oranges/g'
Since there are also macOS folks reading this one (as I did), the following code worked for me (on 10.14)
egrep -rl '<pattern>' <dir> | xargs -I# sed -i '' 's/<arg1>/<arg2>/g' #
All other answers using -i and -e do not work on macOS.
Source
This worked for me:
find ./ -type f -exec sed -i '' 's#NEEDLE#REPLACEMENT#' *.php {} \;
grep -e apple your_site_root/**/*.* -s -l | xargs sed -i "" "s|apple|orange|"
Found a great program for this called ruplacer
https://github.com/dmerejkowsky/ruplacer
Usage
ruplacer before_text after_text # prints out list of things it will replace
ruplacer before_text after_text --go # executes the replacements
It also respects .gitignore so it won't mess up your .git or node_modules directories (find . by default will go into your .git directory and can corrupt it!!!)
I think we can do this with one line simple command
for i in `grep -rl eth0 . 2> /dev/null`; do sed -i ‘s/eth0/eth1/’ $i; done
Refer to this page.
In linuxOS:
sed -i 's/textSerch/textReplace/g' namefile
if "sed" not work try :
perl -i -pe 's/textSerch/textReplace/g' namefile