Bash - sed, replace line nr 1 in all matched files - bash

I have a directory containing many different folders. In these are some php files. I need to change line nr 1 in all files that match a certain string, in all those folders.
All the files I need to change look something this on line nr 1: <?php some text><?php
I need to replace all those 1st lines with "<?php"
I tried this:
grep -rl something /somedir/folder/ | xargs sed -i '' '1s/.*/<?php/
But it only replaces one of the files in the first folder.
I also tried:
grep -rnw something /somedir/folder/ | xargs sed -i '' '1s/.*/<?php/
But then I get this error:
sed: /somedir/folder//1.php:1:<?php: No such file or directory
Any idea how I can fix this?


sed -i -e 's/<\?php.*<\?php/<?php/' `find ./ -type f`
To explain:
sed -i
Run, with sed editing in-place
-e 's/
a replacement command, replacing
<\?php.*<\?php
two consecutive php opening statements (escaping the question marks, because this is a regex)
/
with
<?php
one php opening statement
/'
once per line.
`find ./ -type f`
for everything in this folder that's a file.


find ./ -iname "*.php" -exec sed '1 s/^<?php some text><?php$/<?php/' -i {} \;


I don't know what the intention of the empty string was, when executing sed. Without it it works totally fine for me:
grep -rl something /somedir/folder/ | xargs sed -i '1s/.*/<\?php/'


grep -rl something /somedir/folder/ | xargs sed -i '' '1s/.*/<\?php/'
This sort of works. But it only changes the file it finds first. And not all files. So basically with this I would have to run it 100 times if I have 100 files =)
Any idea how I can get around that?


I found the solution. Now, since I am on OSX, apparently sed does not work exactly the same way as on Linux. Which I did not know. But this is how it can be done:
find ./ -name \*.php -exec sed -i '' -e '1s/.*/<?php/' {} \;
I don't understand exactly why it needs to be like this, but it works.

Related

Using a file's content in sed's replacement string

I've spent hours searching and can't find a solution to this. I have a directory with over 1,000 PHP files. I need to replace some code in these files as follows:
Find:
session_register("CurWebsiteID");
Replace with (saved in replacement.txt:
if(!function_exists ("session_register") && isset($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"])){require_once($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."/libraries/phpruntime/php_legacy_session_functions.php");} session_register("CurWebsiteID");
Using the command below, I'm able to replace the pattern with $(cat replacement.txt) whereas I'm looking to replace them with the content of the text file.
Command being used:
find . -name "*.xml" | xargs -n 1 sed -i -e 's/mercy/$(cat replacement.txt)/g'
I've also tried using variables instead replacement=code_above; and running an adjusted version with $(echo $replacement) but that doesn't help either.
What is the correct way to achieve this?

You don't need command substitution here. You can use the sed r command to insert file content and d to delete the line matching the pattern:
find . -name "*.xml" | xargs -n 1 sed -i -e '/mercy/r replacement.txt' -e '//d'

$(...) is not interpreted inside single quotes. Use double quotes:
find . -name "*.xml" | xargs -n 1 sed -i -e "s/mercy/$(cat replacement.txt)/g"
You can also do away with cat:
find . -name "*.xml" | xargs -n 1 sed -i -e "s/mercy/$(< replacement.txt)/g"
In case replacement.txt has a / in it, use a different delimiter in sed expression, for example #:
find . -name "*.xml" | xargs -n 1 sed -i -e "s#mercy#$(< replacement.txt)#g"
See also:
Use slashes in sed replace

Recursive grep-sed yields error: sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `?' [duplicate]

I run this command to find and replace all occurrences of 'apple' with 'orange' in all files in root of my site:
find ./ -exec sed -i 's/apple/orange/g' {} \;
But it doesn't go through sub directories.
What is wrong with this command?
Here are some lines of output of find ./:
./index.php
./header.php
./fpd
./fpd/font
./fpd/font/desktop.ini
./fpd/font/courier.php
./fpd/font/symbol.php

Your find should look like that to avoid sending directory names to sed:
find ./ -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/apple/orange/g' {} \;

For larger s&r tasks it's better and faster to use grep and xargs, so, for example;
grep -rl 'apples' /dir_to_search_under | xargs sed -i 's/apples/oranges/g'

Since there are also macOS folks reading this one (as I did), the following code worked for me (on 10.14)
egrep -rl '<pattern>' <dir> | xargs -I# sed -i '' 's/<arg1>/<arg2>/g' #
All other answers using -i and -e do not work on macOS.
Source

This worked for me:
find ./ -type f -exec sed -i '' 's#NEEDLE#REPLACEMENT#' *.php {} \;

grep -e apple your_site_root/**/*.* -s -l | xargs sed -i "" "s|apple|orange|"

Found a great program for this called ruplacer
https://github.com/dmerejkowsky/ruplacer
Usage
ruplacer before_text after_text # prints out list of things it will replace
ruplacer before_text after_text --go # executes the replacements
It also respects .gitignore so it won't mess up your .git or node_modules directories (find . by default will go into your .git directory and can corrupt it!!!)

I think we can do this with one line simple command
for i in `grep -rl eth0 . 2> /dev/null`; do sed -i ‘s/eth0/eth1/’ $i; done
Refer to this page.

In linuxOS:
sed -i 's/textSerch/textReplace/g' namefile
if "sed" not work try :
perl -i -pe 's/textSerch/textReplace/g' namefile

Changing file content using sed in bash [duplicate]

How do I find and replace every occurrence of:
subdomainA.example.com
with
subdomainB.example.com
in every text file under the /home/www/ directory tree recursively?

find /home/www \( -type d -name .git -prune \) -o -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
-print0 tells find to print each of the results separated by a null character, rather than a new line. In the unlikely event that your directory has files with newlines in the names, this still lets xargs work on the correct filenames.
\( -type d -name .git -prune \) is an expression which completely skips over all directories named .git. You could easily expand it, if you use SVN or have other folders you want to preserve -- just match against more names. It's roughly equivalent to -not -path .git, but more efficient, because rather than checking every file in the directory, it skips it entirely. The -o after it is required because of how -prune actually works.
For more information, see man find.

The simplest way for me is
grep -rl oldtext . | xargs sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'

Note: Do not run this command on a folder including a git repo - changes to .git could corrupt your git index.
find /home/www/ -type f -exec \
sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +
Compared to other answers here, this is simpler than most and uses sed instead of perl, which is what the original question asked for.

All the tricks are almost the same, but I like this one:
find <mydir> -type f -exec sed -i 's/<string1>/<string2>/g' {} +
find <mydir>: look up in the directory.
-type f:
File is of type: regular file
-exec command {} +:
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the selected files, but the command line is built by appending
each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of the command will be much less than the number of
matched files. The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of
`{}' is allowed within the command. The command is executed in the starting directory.

For me the easiest solution to remember is https://stackoverflow.com/a/2113224/565525, i.e.:
sed -i '' -e 's/subdomainA/subdomainB/g' $(find /home/www/ -type f)
NOTE: -i '' solves OSX problem sed: 1: "...": invalid command code .
NOTE: If there are too many files to process you'll get Argument list too long. The workaround - use find -exec or xargs solution described above.

cd /home/www && find . -type f -print0 |
xargs -0 perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

For anyone using silver searcher (ag)
ag SearchString -l0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/SearchString/Replacement/g'
Since ag ignores git/hg/svn file/folders by default, this is safe to run inside a repository.

This one is compatible with git repositories, and a bit simpler:
Linux:
git grep -l 'original_text' | xargs sed -i 's/original_text/new_text/g'
Mac:
git grep -l 'original_text' | xargs sed -i '' -e 's/original_text/new_text/g'
(Thanks to http://blog.jasonmeridth.com/posts/use-git-grep-to-replace-strings-in-files-in-your-git-repository/)

To cut down on files to recursively sed through, you could grep for your string instance:
grep -rl <oldstring> /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s^<oldstring>^<newstring>^g
If you run man grep you'll notice you can also define an --exlude-dir="*.git" flag if you want to omit searching through .git directories, avoiding git index issues as others have politely pointed out.
Leading you to:
grep -rl --exclude-dir="*.git" <oldstring> /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s^<oldstring>^<newstring>^g

A straight forward method if you need to exclude directories (--exclude-dir=..folder) and also might have file names with spaces (solved by using 0Byte for both grep -Z and xargs -0)
grep -rlZ oldtext . --exclude-dir=.folder | xargs -0 sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'

An one nice oneliner as an extra. Using git grep.
git grep -lz 'subdomainA.example.com' | xargs -0 perl -i'' -pE "s/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g"

Simplest way to replace (all files, directory, recursive)
find . -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
Note: Sometimes you might need to ignore some hidden files i.e. .git, you can use above command.
If you want to include hidden files use,
find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
In both case the string foo will be replaced with new string bar

find /home/www/ -type f -exec perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +
find /home/www/ -type f will list all files in /home/www/ (and its subdirectories).
The "-exec" flag tells find to run the following command on each file found.
perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +
is the command run on the files (many at a time). The {} gets replaced by file names.
The + at the end of the command tells find to build one command for many filenames.
Per the find man page:
"The command line is built in much the same way that
xargs builds its command lines."
Thus it's possible to achieve your goal (and handle filenames containing spaces) without using xargs -0, or -print0.

I just needed this and was not happy with the speed of the available examples. So I came up with my own:
cd /var/www && ack-grep -l --print0 subdomainA.example.com | xargs -0 perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
Ack-grep is very efficient on finding relevant files. This command replaced ~145 000 files with a breeze whereas others took so long I couldn't wait until they finish.

or use the blazing fast GNU Parallel:
grep -rl oldtext . | parallel sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g' {}

grep -lr 'subdomainA.example.com' | while read file; do sed -i "s/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g" "$file"; done
I guess most people don't know that they can pipe something into a "while read file" and it avoids those nasty -print0 args, while presevering spaces in filenames.
Further adding an echo before the sed allows you to see what files will change before actually doing it.

Try this:
sed -i 's/subdomainA/subdomainB/g' `grep -ril 'subdomainA' *`

According to this blog post:
find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/oldtext/newtext/g;'

#!/usr/local/bin/bash -x
find * /home/www -type f | while read files
do
sedtest=$(sed -n '/^/,/$/p' "${files}" | sed -n '/subdomainA/p')
if [ "${sedtest}" ]
then
sed s'/subdomainA/subdomainB/'g "${files}" > "${files}".tmp
mv "${files}".tmp "${files}"
fi
done

If you do not mind using vim together with grep or find tools, you could follow up the answer given by user Gert in this link --> How to do a text replacement in a big folder hierarchy?.
Here's the deal:
recursively grep for the string that you want to replace in a certain path, and take only the complete path of the matching file. (that would be the $(grep 'string' 'pathname' -Rl).
(optional) if you want to make a pre-backup of those files on centralized directory maybe you can use this also: cp -iv $(grep 'string' 'pathname' -Rl) 'centralized-directory-pathname'
after that you can edit/replace at will in vim following a scheme similar to the one provided on the link given:
:bufdo %s#string#replacement#gc | update

You can use awk to solve this as below,
for file in `find /home/www -type f`
do
awk '{gsub(/subdomainA.example.com/,"subdomainB.example.com"); print $0;}' $file > ./tempFile && mv ./tempFile $file;
done
hope this will help you !!!

For replace all occurrences in a git repository you can use:
git ls-files -z | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
See List files in local git repo? for other options to list all files in a repository. The -z options tells git to separate the file names with a zero byte, which assures that xargs (with the option -0) can separate filenames, even if they contain spaces or whatnot.

A bit old school but this worked on OS X.
There are few trickeries:
• Will only edit files with extension .sls under the current directory
• . must be escaped to ensure sed does not evaluate them as "any character"
• , is used as the sed delimiter instead of the usual /
Also note this is to edit a Jinja template to pass a variable in the path of an import (but this is off topic).
First, verify your sed command does what you want (this will only print the changes to stdout, it will not change the files):
for file in $(find . -name *.sls -type f); do echo -e "\n$file: "; sed 's,foo\.bar,foo/bar/\"+baz+\"/,g' $file; done
Edit the sed command as needed, once you are ready to make changes:
for file in $(find . -name *.sls -type f); do echo -e "\n$file: "; sed -i '' 's,foo\.bar,foo/bar/\"+baz+\"/,g' $file; done
Note the -i '' in the sed command, I did not want to create a backup of the original files (as explained in In-place edits with sed on OS X or in Robert Lujo's comment in this page).
Happy seding folks!

just to avoid to change also
NearlysubdomainA.example.com
subdomainA.example.comp.other
but still
subdomainA.example.com.IsIt.good
(maybe not good in the idea behind domain root)
find /home/www/ -type f -exec sed -i 's/\bsubdomainA\.example\.com\b/\1subdomainB.example.com\2/g' {} \;

Here's a version that should be more general than most; it doesn't require find (using du instead), for instance. It does require xargs, which are only found in some versions of Plan 9 (like 9front).
du -a | awk -F' ' '{ print $2 }' | xargs sed -i -e 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
If you want to add filters like file extensions use grep:
du -a | grep "\.scala$" | awk -F' ' '{ print $2 }' | xargs sed -i -e 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

For Qshell (qsh) on IBMi, not bash as tagged by OP.
Limitations of qsh commands:
find does not have the -print0 option
xargs does not have -0 option
sed does not have -i option
Thus the solution in qsh:
PATH='your/path/here'
SEARCH=\'subdomainA.example.com\'
REPLACE=\'subdomainB.example.com\'
for file in $( find ${PATH} -P -type f ); do
TEMP_FILE=${file}.${RANDOM}.temp_file
if [ ! -e ${TEMP_FILE} ]; then
touch -C 819 ${TEMP_FILE}
sed -e 's/'$SEARCH'/'$REPLACE'/g' \
< ${file} > ${TEMP_FILE}
mv ${TEMP_FILE} ${file}
fi
done
Caveats:
Solution excludes error handling
Not Bash as tagged by OP

If you wanted to use this without completely destroying your SVN repository, you can tell 'find' to ignore all hidden files by doing:
find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

Using combination of grep and sed
for pp in $(grep -Rl looking_for_string)
do
sed -i 's/looking_for_string/something_other/g' "${pp}"
done

perl -p -i -e 's/oldthing/new_thingy/g' `grep -ril oldthing *`

to change multiple files (and saving a backup as *.bak):
perl -p -i -e "s/\|/x/g" *
will take all files in directory and replace | with x
called a “Perl pie” (easy as a pie)

replace a particular text in all the files using single line shell command

I have a renamed js file which I have to call in each of my php pages. Now I want to replace that old name with the new one using shell.
what iam using is this:
sed -i ’s/old/new/g’ *
but this is giving the following error:
sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command:
How can I do this replacement?

sed -i.bak 's/old/new/g' *.php
to do it recursively
find /path -type f -iname '*.php' -exec sed -i.bak 's/old/new/' "{}" +;

There are probably less verbose solutions, but here we go:
for i in *; do sed -i 's/old/new/g' "$i"; done
Mind you, it will only work on the current level of the file system, files in subdirectories will not be modified. Also, you might want to replace * with *.php, or make backups (pass an argument after -i, and it will make a backup with the given extension).

this one is very simple, without for or loop, and takes care of any number or nested directories
grep -rl 'oldText' [folderName-optional] | xargs sed -i 's/oldText/newText/g'

You are using Unicode apostrophes (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK - U2019) instead of ASCII (0x27) apostrophes around your sed command argument.

I know I'm really late but still:
find . -type f -name "*.php"|xargs sed -i 's/old/new/g'

perl -pi -e 's/old/new/g' *.php

For completeness, providing the OSX compatible version of the above accepted answer (to answer comment from #jamescampbell)
for i in *.php; do sed -i .orig 's/old/new/g' "$i"; done
This command creates .orig backup files.

Try this:
ls | grep "php" > files.txt
for file in $(cat files.txt); do
sed 's/catch/send/g' $file > TMPfile.php && mv TMPfile.php $file
done

How can I do a recursive find/replace of a string with awk or sed?

How do I find and replace every occurrence of:
subdomainA.example.com
with
subdomainB.example.com
in every text file under the /home/www/ directory tree recursively?

find /home/www \( -type d -name .git -prune \) -o -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
-print0 tells find to print each of the results separated by a null character, rather than a new line. In the unlikely event that your directory has files with newlines in the names, this still lets xargs work on the correct filenames.
\( -type d -name .git -prune \) is an expression which completely skips over all directories named .git. You could easily expand it, if you use SVN or have other folders you want to preserve -- just match against more names. It's roughly equivalent to -not -path .git, but more efficient, because rather than checking every file in the directory, it skips it entirely. The -o after it is required because of how -prune actually works.
For more information, see man find.

The simplest way for me is
grep -rl oldtext . | xargs sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'

Note: Do not run this command on a folder including a git repo - changes to .git could corrupt your git index.
find /home/www/ -type f -exec \
sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +
Compared to other answers here, this is simpler than most and uses sed instead of perl, which is what the original question asked for.

All the tricks are almost the same, but I like this one:
find <mydir> -type f -exec sed -i 's/<string1>/<string2>/g' {} +
find <mydir>: look up in the directory.
-type f:
File is of type: regular file
-exec command {} +:
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the selected files, but the command line is built by appending
each selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of the command will be much less than the number of
matched files. The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of
`{}' is allowed within the command. The command is executed in the starting directory.

For me the easiest solution to remember is https://stackoverflow.com/a/2113224/565525, i.e.:
sed -i '' -e 's/subdomainA/subdomainB/g' $(find /home/www/ -type f)
NOTE: -i '' solves OSX problem sed: 1: "...": invalid command code .
NOTE: If there are too many files to process you'll get Argument list too long. The workaround - use find -exec or xargs solution described above.

cd /home/www && find . -type f -print0 |
xargs -0 perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

For anyone using silver searcher (ag)
ag SearchString -l0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/SearchString/Replacement/g'
Since ag ignores git/hg/svn file/folders by default, this is safe to run inside a repository.

This one is compatible with git repositories, and a bit simpler:
Linux:
git grep -l 'original_text' | xargs sed -i 's/original_text/new_text/g'
Mac:
git grep -l 'original_text' | xargs sed -i '' -e 's/original_text/new_text/g'
(Thanks to http://blog.jasonmeridth.com/posts/use-git-grep-to-replace-strings-in-files-in-your-git-repository/)

To cut down on files to recursively sed through, you could grep for your string instance:
grep -rl <oldstring> /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s^<oldstring>^<newstring>^g
If you run man grep you'll notice you can also define an --exlude-dir="*.git" flag if you want to omit searching through .git directories, avoiding git index issues as others have politely pointed out.
Leading you to:
grep -rl --exclude-dir="*.git" <oldstring> /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s^<oldstring>^<newstring>^g

A straight forward method if you need to exclude directories (--exclude-dir=..folder) and also might have file names with spaces (solved by using 0Byte for both grep -Z and xargs -0)
grep -rlZ oldtext . --exclude-dir=.folder | xargs -0 sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g'

An one nice oneliner as an extra. Using git grep.
git grep -lz 'subdomainA.example.com' | xargs -0 perl -i'' -pE "s/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g"

Simplest way to replace (all files, directory, recursive)
find . -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
Note: Sometimes you might need to ignore some hidden files i.e. .git, you can use above command.
If you want to include hidden files use,
find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
In both case the string foo will be replaced with new string bar

find /home/www/ -type f -exec perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +
find /home/www/ -type f will list all files in /home/www/ (and its subdirectories).
The "-exec" flag tells find to run the following command on each file found.
perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g' {} +
is the command run on the files (many at a time). The {} gets replaced by file names.
The + at the end of the command tells find to build one command for many filenames.
Per the find man page:
"The command line is built in much the same way that
xargs builds its command lines."
Thus it's possible to achieve your goal (and handle filenames containing spaces) without using xargs -0, or -print0.

I just needed this and was not happy with the speed of the available examples. So I came up with my own:
cd /var/www && ack-grep -l --print0 subdomainA.example.com | xargs -0 perl -i.bak -pe 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
Ack-grep is very efficient on finding relevant files. This command replaced ~145 000 files with a breeze whereas others took so long I couldn't wait until they finish.

or use the blazing fast GNU Parallel:
grep -rl oldtext . | parallel sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g' {}

grep -lr 'subdomainA.example.com' | while read file; do sed -i "s/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g" "$file"; done
I guess most people don't know that they can pipe something into a "while read file" and it avoids those nasty -print0 args, while presevering spaces in filenames.
Further adding an echo before the sed allows you to see what files will change before actually doing it.

Try this:
sed -i 's/subdomainA/subdomainB/g' `grep -ril 'subdomainA' *`

According to this blog post:
find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/oldtext/newtext/g;'

#!/usr/local/bin/bash -x
find * /home/www -type f | while read files
do
sedtest=$(sed -n '/^/,/$/p' "${files}" | sed -n '/subdomainA/p')
if [ "${sedtest}" ]
then
sed s'/subdomainA/subdomainB/'g "${files}" > "${files}".tmp
mv "${files}".tmp "${files}"
fi
done

If you do not mind using vim together with grep or find tools, you could follow up the answer given by user Gert in this link --> How to do a text replacement in a big folder hierarchy?.
Here's the deal:
recursively grep for the string that you want to replace in a certain path, and take only the complete path of the matching file. (that would be the $(grep 'string' 'pathname' -Rl).
(optional) if you want to make a pre-backup of those files on centralized directory maybe you can use this also: cp -iv $(grep 'string' 'pathname' -Rl) 'centralized-directory-pathname'
after that you can edit/replace at will in vim following a scheme similar to the one provided on the link given:
:bufdo %s#string#replacement#gc | update

You can use awk to solve this as below,
for file in `find /home/www -type f`
do
awk '{gsub(/subdomainA.example.com/,"subdomainB.example.com"); print $0;}' $file > ./tempFile && mv ./tempFile $file;
done
hope this will help you !!!

For replace all occurrences in a git repository you can use:
git ls-files -z | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
See List files in local git repo? for other options to list all files in a repository. The -z options tells git to separate the file names with a zero byte, which assures that xargs (with the option -0) can separate filenames, even if they contain spaces or whatnot.

A bit old school but this worked on OS X.
There are few trickeries:
• Will only edit files with extension .sls under the current directory
• . must be escaped to ensure sed does not evaluate them as "any character"
• , is used as the sed delimiter instead of the usual /
Also note this is to edit a Jinja template to pass a variable in the path of an import (but this is off topic).
First, verify your sed command does what you want (this will only print the changes to stdout, it will not change the files):
for file in $(find . -name *.sls -type f); do echo -e "\n$file: "; sed 's,foo\.bar,foo/bar/\"+baz+\"/,g' $file; done
Edit the sed command as needed, once you are ready to make changes:
for file in $(find . -name *.sls -type f); do echo -e "\n$file: "; sed -i '' 's,foo\.bar,foo/bar/\"+baz+\"/,g' $file; done
Note the -i '' in the sed command, I did not want to create a backup of the original files (as explained in In-place edits with sed on OS X or in Robert Lujo's comment in this page).
Happy seding folks!

just to avoid to change also
NearlysubdomainA.example.com
subdomainA.example.comp.other
but still
subdomainA.example.com.IsIt.good
(maybe not good in the idea behind domain root)
find /home/www/ -type f -exec sed -i 's/\bsubdomainA\.example\.com\b/\1subdomainB.example.com\2/g' {} \;

Here's a version that should be more general than most; it doesn't require find (using du instead), for instance. It does require xargs, which are only found in some versions of Plan 9 (like 9front).
du -a | awk -F' ' '{ print $2 }' | xargs sed -i -e 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'
If you want to add filters like file extensions use grep:
du -a | grep "\.scala$" | awk -F' ' '{ print $2 }' | xargs sed -i -e 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

For Qshell (qsh) on IBMi, not bash as tagged by OP.
Limitations of qsh commands:
find does not have the -print0 option
xargs does not have -0 option
sed does not have -i option
Thus the solution in qsh:
PATH='your/path/here'
SEARCH=\'subdomainA.example.com\'
REPLACE=\'subdomainB.example.com\'
for file in $( find ${PATH} -P -type f ); do
TEMP_FILE=${file}.${RANDOM}.temp_file
if [ ! -e ${TEMP_FILE} ]; then
touch -C 819 ${TEMP_FILE}
sed -e 's/'$SEARCH'/'$REPLACE'/g' \
< ${file} > ${TEMP_FILE}
mv ${TEMP_FILE} ${file}
fi
done
Caveats:
Solution excludes error handling
Not Bash as tagged by OP

If you wanted to use this without completely destroying your SVN repository, you can tell 'find' to ignore all hidden files by doing:
find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA.example.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

Using combination of grep and sed
for pp in $(grep -Rl looking_for_string)
do
sed -i 's/looking_for_string/something_other/g' "${pp}"
done

perl -p -i -e 's/oldthing/new_thingy/g' `grep -ril oldthing *`

to change multiple files (and saving a backup as *.bak):
perl -p -i -e "s/\|/x/g" *
will take all files in directory and replace | with x
called a “Perl pie” (easy as a pie)

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