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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:
[code]./rpl.sh folderContainingFiles/ oldText newText[/code]

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.

[code]
#!/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
[/code]

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!

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Comment

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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,

  4. 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