Oct

Find and replace command for whole directory in Linux

JIGAR PATEL Category

linux, tips Tags

In many case most of the projects have so many files in so many different folder. So at some point you want to do find and replace for particular word in your whole project or whole directory in that case this command will help you.

In linux for doing this there is no single command but we can design one new command by combination of several.

find /path/to/directory -type f -exec sed -i.bak 's/oldword/newword/g' {} \;

here it creates a .bak backup file of every file it processes, in case you need to revert. If you don’t need the backup files at all, change -i.bak to -i.

To remove all the backup files when you no longer need them:

find /path/to/directory -type f -name "*.bak" -exec rm -f {} \;

NOTE : if your oldword or newword cantains any special character like & or ‘ or newline then you need to Quote it by adding prefix of \

Example: if you want to replace

ShareProgrammingTips

with

&shareprogrammingtips

then your code will be like

find /path/to/directory -type f -exec sed -i.bak 's/ShareProgrammingTips/\&shareprogrammingtips/g' {} \;

JIGAR PATEL

hey I am an Artist who love to write code…! Well I am an EC graduate From Ganpat University and now i am working as Embedded software engineer in one private firm.. find me at here JigAr Patel

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