Unix command to replace a word in a file

All while saving backup copies of the original xml files although this was not a must, since version control would save me here.

Then I found ask ubuntu response and it helped me build my command line:. And it worked perfectly well, my case had six different replacements. Because of that, and if you are accountable to a version control system, you might want to filter first and only pass on to sed those actually having the strings you want; like:. Really lame, but I couldn't get any of the sed commands to work right on OSX, so I did this dumb thing instead:.

I'd just like to add a note to do two things at once - find a file that contains a string and then do a replace, using the find 'chaining' method:. The 'fgrep -l' only triggers if it finds at least one match in a file, it produces no other output.

This will however generate a new. To do this recursively for all files in this directory and all its subdirectories, you need a helper, like find , to traverse the directory tree. From Kaspar's answer I made a bash script to accept command line arguments and optionally limit the filenames matching a pattern. The dir can be set via command line or environment variable, the map is hard coded in the script, but you can modify the code to load from a file, if necessary.

Here is one that works with GNU sed and won't break a git repo:. Or you can use greptile :. I just tested the first script, and the second should work as well. Be careful with escape characters, I think it should be easier to use greptile in most cases. Of course, you can do many interesting things with sed, and for that it may be preferable to master using it with xargs. I found this one from another post can't remember which and while not the most elegant, it's simple and as a novice Linux user has given me no trouble.

Save the file, close gedit , then exit your terminal or just close it and then start it to be able load the new script you added. Press enter and this will automatically replace the oldstring and oldstring1 in all the files that contain them with the correct newstring and newstring1 respectively.

This might help in eliminating the tedious work of typing in case you have multiple directories with files that need string replacement. All you have to do is navigate to each of those directories, then run:. All you have to do is to ensure you've included or added all the replacement strings as I showed you above:. To add a new replace string just open the script we created by typing the following in the terminal:. Don't worry about the number of replace strings you add, they will have no effect if the oldstring is not found.

My problem with many of the answers was that I needed to replace a filepath inside of many files. Though one answer provided mentioned this, it did not work for me. My solution:. However, grep also prints out the line that the string was found on, so the cut command gets rid of this and just keeps the filename.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. How to replace a string in multiple files in linux command line Ask Question. Asked 9 years, 6 months ago. Active 4 months ago. Viewed k times. Drise 4, 4 4 gold badges 37 37 silver badges 64 64 bronze badges.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Frungi 5 5 silver badges 16 16 bronze badges. This doesn't seem to work for me if the string has whitespaces or special characters in it. Any idea why that might be, or do I need to escape them some how? At least for my version of sed , -i requires a string after it, which is appended to the old file names. So sed -i. If anybody want to look for more options, there is an answer on unix stack exchange which covers more use cases site unix.

I suppose you've found out after so long For something recursive you could try the following. Note that it doesn't work if the list of files is huge. Show 9 more comments. Similar to Kaspar's answer but with the g flag to replace all the occurrences on a line. Kellen Stuart 5, 4 4 gold badges 44 44 silver badges 67 67 bronze badges. A verbose option would be cool, but you can just re-grep to see if the changes were made. Registered User. Join Date: Apr Join Date: Dec Just go into the editor edit.

COM among all the normal files like the command interpreter. From what I am aware there isn't an actual command besides edit. To use EDIT. Note that this does not work for formatted documents. Shell Programming and Scripting. Replace a word based upon the file content. I have a file which contains timestamp and date in the second column. If the line contains one of the word then it need to be replace like below. Any help is appreciated.

Perl command to replace word in file Hi, I want to search for a specific word in file and replace whole line with new text.

Replace a word after a particular word in a file. Today's Posts. Quick Links. Search Forums. Show Threads. Show Posts. Replace word in a file. Registered User. Join Date: Dec Sometimes it can be like "use NAME" Hence i need to find the word use and then replace the word after that. I am absolutely clueless about this and I would appreciate your help in this Thanks Sasi. Join Date: Mar Code :. Join Date: Feb Originally Posted by matrixmadhan.

Shell Programming and Scripting.