Find and replace with sed in directory and sub directories

user_313389 0
Viewed 336087

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
sed linux command-line replace
8 Answers

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

user_41857850 
grep -e apple your_site_root/**/*.* -s -l | xargs sed -i "" "s|apple|orage|"
user_21722490

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!!!)

user_21292190
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