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 want to delete all lines begin with 'sometext' from many files:
find . -name "*.php"|xargs -I {} sed -e '/^sometext/d' {}
But this put me output to console. How to modify this files directly?
Use -i option of sed:
sed -i -e '/^sometext/d' file
Tell sed to modify the files "in place":
find . -name "*.php" | xargs sed -i '' -e '/^sometext/d'
Note that the blank '' after -i is required, otherwise a new copy with a default suffix will be created.
Also note the pruning if your unnecessary -I in xaegs
You can accomplish this with exec:
find . -name "*.php" -exec sed -i '/^sometext/d' {} \;
I am trying to delete erroneous emails based on finding the email address in the file via Linux CLI.
I can get the files with
find . | xargs grep -l email#example.com
But I cannot figure out how to delete them from there as the following code doesn't work.
rm -f | xargs find . | xargs grep -l email#example.com
Solution for your command:
grep -l email#example.com * | xargs rm
Or
for file in $(grep -l email#example.com *); do
rm -i $file;
# ^ prompt for delete
done
For safety I normally pipe the output from find to something like awk and create a batch file with each line being "rm filename"
That way you can check it before actually running it and manually fix any odd edge cases that are difficult to do with a regex
find . | xargs grep -l email#example.com | awk '{print "rm "$1}' > doit.sh
vi doit.sh // check for murphy and his law
source doit.sh
You can use find's -exec and -delete, it will only delete the file if the grep command succeeds. Using grep -q so it wouldn't print anything, you can replace the -q with -l to see which files had the string in them.
find . -exec grep -q 'email#example.com' '{}' \; -delete
I liked Martin Beckett's solution but found that file names with spaces could trip it up (like who uses spaces in file names, pfft :D). Also I wanted to review what was matched so I move the matched files to a local folder instead of just deleting them with the 'rm' command:
# Make a folder in the current directory to put the matched files
$ mkdir -p './matched-files'
# Create a script to move files that match the grep
# NOTE: Remove "-name '*.txt'" to allow all file extensions to be searched.
# NOTE: Edit the grep argument 'something' to what you want to search for.
$ find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -al 'something' | awk -F '\n' '{ print "mv \""$0"\" ./matched-files" }' > doit.sh
Or because its possible (in Linux, idk about other OS's) to have newlines in a file name you can use this longer, untested if works better (who puts newlines in filenames? pfft :D), version:
$ find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -alZ 'something' | awk -F '\0' '{ for (x=1; x<NF; x++) print "mv \""$x"\" ./matched-files" }' > doit.sh
# Evaluate the file following the 'source' command as a list of commands executed in the current context:
$ source doit.sh
NOTE: I had issues where grep could not match inside files that had utf-16 encoding.
See here for a workaround. In case that website disappears what you do is use grep's -a flag which makes grep treat files as text and use a regex pattern that matches any first-byte in each extended character. For example to match Entité do this:
grep -a 'Entit.e'
and if that doesn't work then try this:
grep -a 'E.n.t.i.t.e'
Despite Martin's safe answer, if you've got certainty of what you want to delete, such as in writing a script, I've used this with greater success than any other one-liner suggested before around here:
$ find . | grep -l email#example.com | xargs -I {} rm -rf {}
But I rather find by name:
$ find . -iname *something* | xargs -I {} echo {}
rm -f `find . | xargs grep -li email#example.com`
does the job better. Use `...` to run the command to offer the file names containing email.#example.com (grep -l lists them, -i ignores case) to remove them with rm (-f forcibly / -i interactively).
find . | xargs grep -l email#example.com
how to remove:
rm -f 'find . | xargs grep -l email#example.com'
Quick and efficent. Replace find_files_having_this_text with the text you want to search.
grep -Ril 'find_files_having_this_text' . | xargs rm
How can I move all files except one? I am looking for something like:
'mv ~/Linux/Old/!Tux.png ~/Linux/New/'
where I move old stuff to new stuff -folder except Tux.png. !-sign represents a negation. Is there some tool for the job?
If you use bash and have the extglob shell option set (which is usually the case):
mv ~/Linux/Old/!(Tux.png) ~/Linux/New/
Put the following to your .bashrc
shopt -s extglob
It extends regexes.
You can then move all files except one by
mv !(fileOne) ~/path/newFolder
Exceptions in relation to other commands
Note that, in copying directories, the forward-flash cannot be used in the name as noticed in the thread Why extglob except breaking except condition?:
cp -r !(Backups.backupdb) /home/masi/Documents/
so Backups.backupdb/ is wrong here before the negation and I would not use it neither in moving directories because of the risk of using wrongly then globs with other commands and possible other exceptions.
I would go with the traditional find & xargs way:
find ~/Linux/Old -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -not -name Tux.png -print0 |
xargs -0 mv -t ~/Linux/New
-maxdepth 1 makes it not search recursively. If you only care about files, you can say -type f. -mindepth 1 makes it not include the ~/Linux/Old path itself into the result. Works with any filenames, including with those that contain embedded newlines.
One comment notes that the mv -t option is a probably GNU extension. For systems that don't have it
find ~/Linux/Old -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -not -name Tux.png \
-exec mv '{}' ~/Linux/New \;
A quick way would be to modify the tux filename so that your move command will not match.
For example:
mv Tux.png .Tux.png
mv * ~/somefolder
mv .Tux.png Tux.png
I think the easiest way to do is with backticks
mv `ls -1 ~/Linux/Old/ | grep -v Tux.png` ~/Linux/New/
Edit:
Use backslash with ls instead to prevent using it with alias, i.e. mostly ls is aliased as ls --color.
mv `\ls -1 ~/Linux/Old/ | grep -v Tux.png` ~/Linux/New/
Thanks #Arnold Roa
For bash, sth answer is correct. Here is the zsh (my shell of choice) syntax:
mv ~/Linux/Old/^Tux.png ~/Linux/New/
Requires EXTENDED_GLOB shell option to be set.
I find this to be a bit safer and easier to rely on for simple moves that exclude certain files or directories.
ls -1 | grep -v ^$EXCLUDE | xargs -I{} mv {} $TARGET
This could be simpler and easy to remember and it works for me.
mv $(ls ~/folder | grep -v ~/folder/exclude.png) ~/destination
The following is not a 100% guaranteed method, and should not at all be attempted for scripting. But some times it is good enough for quick interactive shell usage. A file file glob like
[abc]*
(which will match all files with names starting with a, b or c) can be negated by inserting a "^" character first, i.e.
[^abc]*
I sometimes use this for not matching the "lost+found" directory, like for instance:
mv /mnt/usbdisk/[^l]* /home/user/stuff/.
Of course if there are other files starting with l I have to process those afterwards.
How about:
mv $(echo * | sed s:Tux.png::g) ~/Linux/New/
You have to be in the folder though.
This can bei done without grep like this:
ls ~/Linux/Old/ -QI Tux.png | xargs -I{} mv ~/Linux/Old/{} ~/Linux/New/
Note: -I is a captial i and makes the ls command ignore the Tux.png file, which is listed afterwards.
The output of ls is then piped into mv via xargs, which allows to use the output of ls as source argument for mv.
ls -Q just quotes the filenames listed by ls.
mv `find Linux/Old '!' -type d | fgrep -v Tux.png` Linux/New
The find command lists all regular files and the fgrep command filters out any Tux.png. The backticks tell mv to move the resulting file list.
ls ~/Linux/Old/ | grep -v Tux.png | xargs -i {} mv ~/Linux/New/'
move all files(not include except file) to except_file
find -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -not -name except_file -print0 |xargs -0 mv -t ./except_file
for example(cache is current except file)
find -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -not -name cache -print0 |xargs -0 mv -t ./cache
I'm using grep to generate a list of files I need to move:
grep -L -r 'Subject: \[SPAM\]' .
How can I pass this list to the mv command and move the files somewhere else?
If you want to find and move files that do not match your pattern (move files that don't contain 'Subject \[SPAM\]' in this example) use:
grep -L -Z -r 'Subject: \[SPAM\]' . | xargs -0 -I{} mv {} DIR
The -Z means output with zeros (\0) after the filenames (so spaces are not used as delimeters).
xargs -0
means interpret \0 to be delimiters.
The -L means find files that do not match the pattern. Replace -L with -l if you want to move files that match your pattern.
Then
-I{} mv {} DIR
means replace {} with the filenames, so you get mv filenames DIR.
This alternative works where xargs is not availabe:
grep -L -r 'Subject: \[SPAM\]' . | while read f; do mv "$f" out; done
This is what I use in Fedora Core 12:
grep -l 'Subject: \[SPAM\]' | xargs -I '{}' mv '{}' DIR
This is what helped me:
grep -lir 'spam' ./ | xargs mv -t ../spam
Of course, I was already in required folder (that's why ./) and moved them to neighboring folder. But you can change them to any paths.
I don't know why accepted answer didn't work. Also I didn't have spaces and special characters in filenames - maybe this will not work.
Stolen here: Grep command to find files containing text string and move them
mv `grep -L -r 'Subject: \[SPAM\]' .` <directory_path>
Assuming that the grep you wrote returns the files paths you're expecting.
Maybe this will work:
mv $(grep -l 'Subject: \[SPAM\]' | awk -F ':' '{print $1}') your_file
There are several ways but here is a slow but failsafe one :
IFS=$'\n'; # set the field separator to line break
for $mail in $(grep -L -r 'Subject: \[SPAM\]' .); do mv "$mail" your_dir; done;
IFS=' '; # restore FS
Work perfect fo me :
move files who contain the text withe the word MYSTRINGTOSEARCH to directory MYDIR.
find . -type f -exec grep -il 'MYSTRINGTOSEARCH' {} \; -exec mv {} MYDIR/ \;
I hope this helps
You can pass the result to the next command by using
grep ... | xargs mv {} destination
Check man xargs for more info.