Complex (?) Unix Text Replace Command

Question

What's the command line equivalent of: For every file that contains "AAA" within its contents, find "BBB" and replace it with "CCC"

Thus, the command would match and replace BBB in a file:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
AAA
Hello world!
BBB    
</body>
</html>

But Not in a file:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
Don't match me!
BBB    
</body>
</html>

Thanks in advance!

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13 12:13:41Z

2

Something like grep -l AAA file-names | xargs sed -i .bak 's/BBB/CCC/g' should work. In the future, you might want to ask questions like this on https://serverfault.com/ instead.

edited Apr 13, 2017 at 12:13

CommunityBot

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answered Feb 14, 2011 at 3:38

D.Shawley

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2 Comments

Matrym Over a year ago

Can I replace file-names with . to go through all files? what's the .bak about? I've already made backups.

Matrym Over a year ago

Thanks! I asked elsewhere and got the following. What does yours do differently? ::: grep -Rl AAA . | xargs sed -i -e 's/BBB/CCC/'

Alex Nikolaenkov · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-14 03:40:38Z

0

Using positive look behind also can do the trick s/(?<=AAA).*?(BBB)/CCC/g.

answered Feb 14, 2011 at 3:40

Alex Nikolaenkov

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