Sed find and replace in folder

Saturday, 23 February 2008

Here's a handy one-liner to help you replace strings globally throughout all the files in a specified folder. This procedure is also called mass find and replace, or global replace.

You can even use it on windows if you're willing to spent a few minutes installing cygwin , a windows port of the gnu/linux most used utilities (including the bash shell and even X11)

The code below will replace every occurence of 'ugly' with 'beautiful'.

Linux example:

find /home/bruno/old-friends -type f -exec sed -i 's/ugly/beautiful/g' {} ;

Cygwin example (you have to use unix-style paths):

find /cygdrive/c/xampp/joomla/ -type f -exec sed -i 's/ugly/beautiful/g' {} ;

 /cygdrive/c/ stands for the root of your C windows drive letter

Also note that Cygwin requires you to use the forward slash delimiter instead of the windows backslash delimiter. The bash shell allows TAB completion for paths, just type the first few letters and hit TAB to auto-complete the path.

If you want to filter, let's say, php files, you can add -name '*.php' to command-line arguments, just after the search path.

find /cygdrive/c/xampp/joomla/ -type f -name '*.php' -exec sed -i 's/ugly/beautiful/g' {} ;

Sometimes you may need a more powerful regex engine, so here's how to use PERL to perform a global substitution:

$ find . -type f -name '*.php' -exec perl -pi -e 's/struct\[(.+?)\]/struct(\1)/g' {} ;

The above command will search for .php files in the current(working) folder and replace struct[some text] with struct(sometext). This command uses the \1 backreference syntax to specify that the match found in the first set of paranthesis should be included in our replace pattern.

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Comments (3)

1. Cygwin20-02-2010 18:18

Bjørn Børresen http://www.bybjorn.com

Thanks for the info,

to get this to work in Cygwin I needed tp append a \ before the ending semicolon, so it looks like this for instance:

find ./ -type f -name '*.css' -exec sed -i 's|OLD|NEW|g' {} \;

without the final \ I'd get:

find: missing argument to `-exec'

Thanks again!

2. Software Engineer28-05-2008 23:57

Jerry Lumpkins http://not worth looking at...

Hi,

I appreciated the sample mass replace line.

On my linux (Gentoo), I had to escape the semicolon to get it to work:
find . -type f -name "*.sh" -exec sed -i 's/projects/sandbox/g' '{}' \;

It then worked great!

Thanks again,

j

3. Delimiters05-05-2008 20:16

Tudor http://www.teachmejoomla.net

If you're having trouble trying to replace strings that contain slashes or backslashes, you can always use pipe '|' as a string delimiter
find /cygdrive/c/xampp/joomla/ -type f -name '*.php' -exec sed -i 's|yes\/no|ok\/cancel|g' {} \;

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