Search and Replace Recursively using sed and grep

I have done this so many times, still I find a new problem doing recursive search and replace each time! Here's one small shell script that puts the issues I had on the Mac doing search and replace on a directory recursively.

Save the file as rpl.sh, chmod it 755, and execute it like:

./rpl.sh folderContainingFiles/ oldText newText

Does the job for me! This could be done in a single line, I got some ideas of using xargs etc, but all that did not work on my Mac (at least). So resorting to this.

#!/bin/sh
grep -rl $2 $1 |
while read filename
do
(
echo $filename
sed "s/$2/$3/g;" $filename \> $filename.xx
mv $filename.xx $filename
)
done

And yes, if you are going to use this, take a little time and do some argument checking before passing them around! Unless you think only a God user like you is going to use it!

10 comments

Comments are closed - these are preserved from the original posts.

t3rmin4t0r31 December 2007

find containingFolder/ -type f -exec sed -i~ "s/oldText/newText/g" {} \;

Nirav4 January 2008

The exec part here: wouldn't it fork a new process for every file? Is that a good practice? I thought otherwise!

Nirav4 January 2008

BTW, Manish has a way to do this using Perl - http://mannu.livejournal.com/406783.html.

Leonardo25 June 2008

for i in `find` ; do sed "s/pattern/replacement/g" "$i" >> "$i.xx"; mv "$i.xx" "$i"; done

I don't know if this work in mac.

ezequiel2 September 2008

I haven't ever seen a better file than this. It solved me days of work, you are gorgeous.

I NEVER write comments to posts because I don't have time, but this time I have 4 working-days of free credit that you have just saved me with this file.

Thanks. ezequiel.

Rookie5 September 2008

For whole words, update line 7:
sed "s/\b$2\b/$3/g;" $filename> $filename.xx

Trestini2 March 2009

sed -i 's/oldText/newText/g' `grep -ril 'oldText' *` works fine for me

Antonio5 December 2009

A small improvement:
Change

mv $filename.xx $filename

cp $filename.xx $filename
rm $filename.xx

and original file permissions will be preserved

Hugo Magalhães12 February 2010

You can avoid the creation of a temporary file using -i option for sed:

1 #!/bin/sh
2 grep -rl $2 $1 |
3 while read filename
4 do
5 (
6 echo $filename
7 sed -i "s/$2/$3/g;" $filename
8 )
9 done

Regards,

Ryan17 September 2010

I could not get any of these working. But this works great:

#!/bin/bash
for filename in `grep -rl $2 $1`
do
echo $filename
sed -i "s#$2#$3#g;" $filename
done