Grep and Sed Error - bash

I want to find a string in some files in a recursive directory and replace it with another string.
The string I want to find is 0x04030000&0xffff0000.
The string I want to replace is 0x80863a30.
I tried some examples but grep and sed cause some errors.
Like grep says 0xffff0000 command not found
Im Using Mac OS X 10.8.5
This was the command I tried and the error I received:
localhost:~ User$ grep -rl 0x04030000&0xffff0000 /Users/Niresh/Desktop/TTT | xargs sed -i 's/0x04030000&0xffff0000/0x80863a30/g'
[4] 1166
-bash: 0xffff0000: command not found
grep: warning: recursive search of stdin
[4]+ Stopped grep -rl 0x04030000
Tried This Command Too But Not Working
localhost:~ Niresh$ mkdir TTT
localhost:~ Niresh$ echo "TTT 0x04030000&0xffff0000 bar" > TTT/bar
localhost:~ Niresh$ find TTT -type f -exec sed -i'' -e 's/0x04030000&0xffff0000/0x80863a30/g' {} \;
localhost:~ Niresh$ cat TTT/bar
TTT 0x80863a30 bar
localhost:~ Niresh$ TTT 0x80863a30 bar
-bash: TTT: command not found
but I have Tried This Too sed -i'' -e 's/0x04030000&0xffff0000/0x80863a30/g' "Here Was My Path to The Text File"
But The Command Execute Successfully but The Text Remains Still
I Read The Man Page of sed
It Shows
Bugs Multibyte characters containing a byte with value 0x5C (ASCII `\') may be
incorrectly treated as line continuation characters in arguments to the
a'',c'' and i'' commands. Multibyte characters cannot be used as
delimiters with thes'' and ``y'' commands.
BSD May 10, 2005

Your & is being interpeted by your shell. To avoid this, you should quote your search:
grep -rl '0x04030000&0xffff0000' /Users/Niresh/Desktop/TTT | xargs sed -i 's/0x04030000&0xffff0000/0x80863a30/g'

FatalError has already identified the & problem in your command line.
Also, this is a bad way to handle files, due to the Parsing LS problem. Instead of relying on xargs to capture filenames as the output of grep, you should use find. For example:
# find /Users/Niresh/Desktop/TTT -type f \
-exec grep -q '0x04030000&0xffff0000' {} \; \
-exec sed -i'' -e 's/0x04030000&0xffff0000/0x80863a30/g' {} \;
(split to multiple lines for easier reading.)
The idea here is that find will be responsible for your filenames, and will run each of the tools to do (1) the analysis and (2) the modification. Note that the grep here is probably redundant, as sed will simply make no changes to files where it doesn't find the search string.
This saves you from issues where there are special characters in your filenames (spaces or newlines or backslashes) which would be misinterpreted by your pipe to xargs.
UPDATE (per comments):
Works for me:
ghoti#mac:~ 507$ mkdir foo
ghoti#mac:~ 508$ echo "foo 0x04030000&0xffff0000 bar" > foo/bar
ghoti#mac:~ 509$ find foo -type f -exec sed -i'' -e 's/0x04030000&0xffff0000/0x80863a30/g' {} \;
ghoti#mac:~ 510$ cat foo/bar
foo 0x80863a30 bar
ghoti#mac:~ 511$
If this doesn't work for you, please update your question with the results of your attempts.

You can use the following:
find /Users/Niresh/Desktop/TTT -type f -exec sed -i 's/0x04030000&0xffff0000/0x80863a30/g' {} \;
This should do the job.

grep -rl 0x04030000&0xffff0000 /Users/Niresh/Desktop/TTT | xargs sed -i 's/0x04030000\&0xffff0000/0x80863a30/g'
The & Was identified as a special character to fix it just to add a slash \ before the & ( \& ) solved the problem

Related

How to find many files from txt file in directory and subdirectories, then copy all to new folder

I can't find posts that help with this exact problem:
On Mac Terminal I want to read a txt file (example.txt) containing file names such as:
20130815 144129 865 000000 0172 0780.bmp
20130815 144221 511 000003 1068 0408.bmp
....100 more
And I want to search for them in a certain folder/subfolders (example_folder). After each find, the file should be copied to a new folder x (new_destination).
Your help would be much appreciated!
Chers,
Mo
You could use a piped command with a combination of ls, grep, xargs and cp.
So basically you start with getting the list of files
ls
then you filter them with egrep -e, grep -e or whatever flavor of grep Mac uses for their terminal. If you want to find all files ending with text you can use the regex .txt$ (which means ends with '.txt')
ls | egrep -e "yourRegexExpression"
After that you get an input stream, but cp doesn't work with input streams and only takes a bunch of arguments, that's why we use xargs to convert it to arguments. The final step is to add the flag -t to the argument to signify that the next argument is the target directory.
ls | egrep -e "yourRegexExpression" | xargs cp -t DIRECTORY
I hope this helps!
Edit
Sorry I didn't read the question well enough, I updated to be match your problem. Here you can see that the egrep command compiles a rather large regex string with all the file names in this way (filename1|filename2|...|fileN). The $() evaluates the command inside and uses the tr to translate newLines to "|" for the regex.
ls | egrep -e "("$(cat yourtextfile.txt | tr "\n" "|")")" | xargs cp -t DIRECTORY
You could do something like:
$ for i in `cat example.txt`
find /search/path -type f -name "$i" -exec cp "{}" /new/path \;
This is how it works, for every line within example.txt:
for i in `cat example.txt`
it will try to find a file matching the line $i in the defined path:
find /search/path -type f -name "$i"
And if found it will copy it to the desired location:
-exec cp "{}" /new/path \;

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)

In-line text replacement using sed, shell, or some other means

I want to pass two parameters to a program, a file name and a modified version of the file name. The situation is I have a bunch of .html.erb files in a directory tree, and I want invoke html2haml on them with the original filename and a new output filename with the haml extension, like so:
html2haml thing.html.erb thing.html.haml
Here's my current best attempt at this:
find . -name "*.html.erb" -exec echo {} `echo {} | sed "s/.erb/.haml/g"` \;
(after I'm done testing I'll replace echo with html2haml and run it again)
However it doesn't work. The result of the expression inside backticks is the unmodified string.
Here are some experiments I tried which DO behave as expected (to test if my syntax and levels of escaping/quotes were correct):
1. echo myfile.foo | sed 's/foo/foo2/g'
2. find . -name "*.html.erb" -exec echo {} `echo xyz | sed "s/y/Y/g"` \;
3. find . -name "*.html.erb" -exec echo {} `echo {} hello` \;
4. find . -name "*.html.erb" -exec echo {} `echo {}` \;
The fact that these all behave as expected suggest to me that I am getting some small thing wrong in the syntax, and that is is indeed possible to do this with a one-liner.
If this is impossible, it might be because of a misunderstanding about "when" find inserts its results on each invocation. example #3 above suggest to me that it does it exactly when i need/expect it to (because I'm successfully concatenating each individual result string with "hello").
If you have gsed:
find . -name \*.erb -print0 | gsed -z 'p;s/.erb$/.haml/' | xargs -0 -n2 html2haml
If you don't have gsed and only have sed, this will work, but only if none of your file names have whitespace.
find . -name \*.erb -print | sed 'p;s/.erb$/.haml/' | xargs -n2 html2haml
Discussion about these and other techniques follows:
I have different versions of sed - my GNU sed is called gsed, if your sed is GNU - instead of gsed use sed.
You can check your sed with the sed --version, if prints something like:
sed (GNU sed) 4.2.2
Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
You have a GNU sed.
The above - for the next find
$ find . -name \*foo -print
./a/test.foo
./b/c/test.foo
./b/te st.foo #<- note the filename with space
./b/test.foo
the above command produces:
$find . -name \*foo -print0 | gsed -z 'p;s/foo$/foo2/' | xargs -0 -n2 echo bar
bar ./a/test.foo ./a/test.foo2
bar ./b/c/test.foo ./b/c/test.foo2
bar ./b/te st.foo ./b/te st.foo2
bar ./b/test.foo ./b/test.foo2
Without additional scripts or functions. ;)
or you can replace the sed with perl, so the next
find . -name \*foo -print0 | perl -n0le 'print;s/foo/foo2/;print' | xargs -0 -n2 echo bar
produces the same result:
bar ./a/test.foo ./a/test.foo2
bar ./b/c/test.foo ./b/c/test.foo2
bar ./b/te st.foo ./b/te st.foo2
bar ./b/test.foo ./b/test.foo2
IF you REALLY want to do it within one find, try:
find . -name \*html.erb -exec sh -c 'echo html2haml "{}" "$(echo "{}" | sed 's/\.erb/\.haml/')"' \;
or elimitating two useless echo the final command:
find . -name \*html.erb -exec sh -c 'html2haml "{}" "$(sed 's/\.erb/\.haml/'<<<"{}")"' \;
What about a loop?
find . -name "*.html.erb" | while read file
do
haml_file=${file%.erb}.haml
html2haml $file $haml_file
done
The ${var%glob} syntax takes an environment variable ${var} and filters out the smallest portion of the right side that matches glob.
If you know that the filename ends with .foo, then you can use:
do_something "$filename" "${filename%.foo}.foo2"
(In the unlikely case that you really want to just put a 2 on the end, you could of course just use "${filename}2". But I assume the foo and foo2 are to be substituted with less similar strings.)
If you want to invoke do_something from find, your best bet would be to pass it only one filename (or, better, a number of filenames each of them representing a single operation). For example:
-- do_something.sh
#!/bin/bash
# This is the definition of what you want to do.
# It is called as `bar old_filename new_filename`
bar() {
# For example
mv "$1" "$2"
}
for filename in "$#"; do
bar "$filename" "${filename%.foo}.foo2"
done
-- find command:
find . -type f -name '*.foo' -exec do_something.sh {} +
If you really need to use sed (for something that you can't even do with the bash replace syntax, ${var/pattern/substitution}), then set up do_something as above, but replace the line inside the for loop with, for example:
bar "$filename" "$(sed -r 's/([^.]+)\.([^.]+)$/\2.\1/' <<<"$filename")"
Explanation: The above sed expression (gnu-specific) flips the last two extensions around, so it would change some.file.html.en into some.file.en.html. -r causes gnu sed to use extended regex format, which I find more readable. <<< is a bashism which expands the word following it and feeds it into stdin, somewhat similar to echo "$filename" | sed ... but without creating another subprocess.
You can call your find like this:
find . -name "*.html.erb" -print0 -print0|xargs -0 -J % html2haml % | sed 's/\.erb$/.haml/'
This will result in executing:
html2haml thing.html.erb thing.html.haml

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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