Linux: how to find and replace text in multiple files

Often times I need to search and replace a string of text across multiple files in my Linux box. After a bit of research I've come up with a nice solution. Assuming that you want to search for the string search through multiple files and replace it with replace, this is the one-liner:

grep -RiIl 'search' | xargs sed -i 's/search/replace/g'

Let me now dissect it and take a quick look at the different tools in use.

grep

grep is a utility for searching for strings through multiple text files. Here I'm invoking it with the following parameters:

• R — perform a recursive search, also across symbolic links;
• i — case-insensitive search
• I — skip binary files. We are working with text, afer all;
• l — print results as a simple list of file names. This is needed for the next command.

The output of grep is then piped to ...

xargs

This is a little command-line utility that takes what receives in input and passes it as argument to another program. So in this example the output of grep is passed to the next command sed as its argument.

sed

sed is a glorious Unix utility that transforms text. In the current snippet I'm using it to replace text with the following parameters:

• i — replace in file. Remove it for a dry run mode;
• s/search/replace/g — this is the substitution command. The s stands for substitute (i.e. replace), the g instructs the command to replace all occurrences.

Fine tuning 1: how to exclude directories while searching

You can add the --exclude-dir=<dir> parameter to grep if you want to skip a specific directory while searching for files. For example, say you want to skip the tests/ directory:

grep -RiIl --exclude-dir=tests 'search' | xargs sed 's/search/replace/g'

Exclude multiple directories by wrapping them into curly braces, like so:

grep -RiIl --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,dir3} 'search' | xargs sed 's/search/replace/g'

Fine tuning 2: regular expressions

Both grep and sed support regular expressions, so you can search with grep given a specific pattern and then replace the text with sed given another one. Take a look at the grep manual and the sed manual for more information.

Sources

StackOverflow - How to replace a string in multiple files in linux command line