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I have a hierarchy of directories containing many text files. I would like to search for a particular text string every time it comes up in one of the files, and replace it with another string. For example, I may want to replace every occurrence of the string "Coke" with "Pepsi". Does anyone know how to do this? I am wondering if there is some sort of Bash command that can do this without having to load all these files in an editor, or come up with a more complex script to do it.

I found this page explaining a trick using sed, but it doesn't seem to work in files in subdirectories.

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    I hate it when this happens. Four answers that are very close in under 3 minutes. Sometimes answering these questions becomes a race... very stresfull... waiting for the yellow bar at the top saying "load answers" Commented May 18, 2010 at 19:04
  • Many of you submitted suggestions that worked. I accepted theatrus's simply because he replied first. Commented May 18, 2010 at 19:25

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15

Use sed in combination with find. For instance:

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs sed -i s/Coke/Pepsi/g

or

find . -name "*.txt" -exec sed -i s/Coke/Pepsi/g {} \;

(See the man page on find for more information)

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also,if you're using a combination of find and xargs, particularly in a script, it's always best to use find -print0 and xargs -0, to guard against files with spaces in their names
@mikez302: Please take Martin's comment into account. xargs is often not required and should usually be used with the -0 switch. The second solution is much better.
find also has the option to spawn only a single process for all results if you use + instead of ; as the delimiter to -exec: find . -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i 's/Coke/Pepsi/g' '{}' +
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IMO, the tool with the easiest usage for this task is rpl:

rpl -R Coke Pepsi .

(-R is for recursive replacement in all subdirectories)

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Links: Original, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora
@Dennis: Thanks! I should have thought about adding at least one of them.
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Combine sed with find like this:

find . -name "file.*" -exec sed -i 's/Coke/Pepsi/g' {} \;
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find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/old-word/new-word/g' {} \;

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2

I usually do it in perl. However watch out - it uses regexps which are much more powerful then normal string substitution:

% perl -pi -e 's/Coke/Pepsi/g;' $filename

EDIT I forgot about subdirectories

% find ./ -exec perl -pi -e 's/Coke/Pepsi/g;' {} \;
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you want a combination of find and sed

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You may also:

Search & replace with find & ed

http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/2299

(which also features a test mode via -t flag)

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