Find and replace across files - Linux command line

// under command find linux replace text useful

Today’s interesting post concerns finding and replacing terms across multiple files via a simple command.  Thanks to this great blog post, it all comes down to one single line.  I had found a previously-useful line of code, but the problem with that one was the fact that it used the find command.  The problem with that is that if you do a wildcard search for * in a directory, it’ll give you back ‘.’ as a result.  Trying to work with that just wasn’t happening.

So, without further ado, the command (replacing ‘search’ with your search term and ‘target’ with your replacement term’):

grep -lr -e 'search' * | xargs sed -i 's/search/target/g'

Just remember, the first grep command is doing Regex, so escape anything Regex-y (dots, slashes, etc) or otherwise “prepare for unforseen consequences” when running sed.

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