I need to replace some string into another in files. I know how to do that with single file: sed -i 's/a/b/'. But what about recursive function? I think I have to use find . -name * with xargs somehow.
I need your help :)
You are correct, find and xargs are what you want to use. Here's an example which will find all files with the ".ext" file extension in the current folder and all subfolders ,and replace the letter a with the letter b in the files.
find . -name "*.ext" | xargs sed -i 's/a/b/g'
Related
I am looking for a quick command to search all .htaccess files for a specific IP address and change it to another IP address from the command line
something like
grep -rl '255.255.254.254' ./ | xargs sed -i 's/254/253/g'
I know the above example is a bad way to do it, just an example (and showing I did some searching to find a solution
Search: files with filename .htaccess (within 2 levels deep of current path?)
Find: 255.255.254.254
Replace with: 255.255.253.253
or, is this too much to ask of my server and I would be better off replacing them as I find them?
Try:
find . -type f -name '.htaccess' -execdir sed -i 's/255\.255\.254\.254/255.255.253.253/g' {} +
How it works:
find .
Start looking for files in the current directory.
-type f
Look only for regular files.
-name '.htaccess'
Look only for files named .htaccess.
-execdir sed -i 's/255\.255\.254\.254/255.255.253.253/g' {} +
For any such files found, run this sed command on them.
Because . is a wildcard and you likely want to match only literal periods, we escape them: \.
We use -execdir rather than the older -exec because it is more secure against race conditions.
These SSH commands work in changing text for several files in a directory
replace "old-string" "new-String" -- *.ext
replace "old-string" "new-String" -- *
replace "old-string" "new-String" -- filename
however these won't target subdirectories... anybody knows the command to include ALL subdirectories?
I think sed is better for this. Your first two examples can be rewritten:
find . -type f | xargs sed -i s/old-string/new-string/g
find . -type f -name '*.ext' | xargs sed -i s/old-string/new-string/g
You can also pipe the results of find to your replace command, if that is better for you.
I want to insert a line into the start of multiple specified type files, which the files are located in current directory or the sub dir.
I know that using
find . -name "*.csv"
can help me to list the files I want to use for inserting.
and using
sed -i '1icolumn1,column2,column3' test.csv
can use to insert one line at the start of file,
but now I do NOT know how to pipe the filenames from "find" command to "sed" command.
Could anybody give me any suggestion?
Or is there any better solution to do this?
BTW, is it work to do this in one line command?
Try using xargs to pass output of find and command line arguments to next command, here sed
find . -type f -name '*.csv' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '1icolumn1,column2,column3'
Another option would be to use -exec option of find.
find . -type f -name '*.csv' -exec sed -i '1icolumn1,column2,column3' {} \;
Note : It has been observed that xargs is more efficient way and can handle multiple processes using -P option.
This way :
find . -type f -name "*.csv" -exec sed -i '1icolumn1,column2,column3' {} +
-exec do all the magic here. The relevant part of man find :
-exec command ;
Execute command; true if 0 status is returned. All following arguments
to find are taken to be arguments to the command until an argument consisting
of `;' is encountered. The string `{}' is replaced by the current file name
being processed everywhere it occurs in the arguments to the command, not just
in arguments where it is alone, as in some versions of find. Both of
these constructions might need to be escaped (with a `\') or quoted to protect
them from expansion by the shell. See the EXAMPLES section for examples of
the use of the -exec option. The specified command is run once for each
matched file. The command is executed in the starting directory. There
are unavoidable security problems surrounding use of the -exec action;
you should use the -execdir option instead
I am trying to find the whole source code for occurrences of, say, "MY_NAME" and want to replace it with, say, "YOUR_NAME". I already know the files and the line numbers where they occur and i want to make a patch for the same so that anyone running the patch can do the same. Can anyone please help?
You can do it by console. Just use find to locate destination files, and then you can declare what you want to replace with what sentence. In example:
find -name '*' | xargs perl -pi -e 's/MY_NAME/YOUR_NAME/g'
It might be easier to do a sed command, and then generate a patch.
sed -e '12s/MY_NAME/YOUR_NAME/g;32s/MY_NAME/YOUR_NAME/g' file > file2
This will replace MY_NAME with YOUR_NAME on lines 12 and 32, and save the output into file2.
You can also generate a sed script if there are many changes:
#!/bin/sed -f
12s/MY_NAME/YOUR_NAME/g
32s/MY_NAME/YOUR_NAME/g
Then, for applying to many files, you should use find:
find -type f '(' -iname "*.c" -or -iname "*.h" ')' -exec "./script.sed" '{}' \;
Hope this helps =)
Use the command diff to create a patch-file that can then be distributed and applied with the patch-command.
man diff Will give you a lot of information on the process.
I want to replace for example all instances of "123" with "321" contained within all .txt files in a folder (recursively).
I thought of doing this
sed -i 's/123/321/g' | find . -name \*.txt
but before possibly screwing all my files I would like to ask if it will work.
You have the sed and the find back to front. With GNU sed and the -i option, you could use:
find . -name '*.txt' -type f -exec sed -i s/123/321/g {} +
The find finds files with extension .txt and runs the sed -i command on groups of them (that's the + at the end; it's standard in POSIX 2008, but not all versions of find necessarily support it). In this example substitution, there's no danger of misinterpretation of the s/123/321/g command so I've not enclosed it in quotes. However, for simplicity and general safety, it is probably better to enclose the sed script in single quotes whenever possible.
You could also use xargs (and again using GNU extensions -print0 to find and -0 and -r to xargs):
find . -name '*.txt' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -r sed -i 's/123/321/g'
The -r means 'do not run if there are no arguments' (so the find doesn't find anything). The -print0 and -0 work in tandem, generating file names ending with the C null byte '\0' instead of a newline, and avoiding misinterpretation of file names containing newlines, blanks and so on.
Note that before running the script on the real data, you can and should test it. Make a dummy directory (I usually call it junk), copy some sample files into the junk directory, change directory into the junk directory, and test your script on those files. Since they're copies, there's no harm done if something goes wrong. And you can simply remove everything in the directory afterwards: rm -fr junk should never cause you anguish.