Comments on: Howto Replace multiple file text string in Linux

By: J

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:22:05 +0000

James’ solutions don’t work if your directories have space in their names.

By: afjal

afjal — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:46:35 +0000

1. $grep -R –files-with-matches ‘OLDSTRING’ . | sort | uniq | xargs perl -pi~ -e ’s/OLDSTRING/NEWSTRING/’

2. $ grep -rl OLDSTRING . | xargs perl -pi~ -e ’s/OLDSTRING/NEWSTRING/’

I tried both the options, but no use, i am on Linux4 63 bit.

please let me know how to proceed !

Thanks to ALL

By: Eol

Eol — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:57:56 +0000

James’s solution works excellent for me
Thanks a lot!

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 22:56:55 +0000

daniel:

You’ll get that error if you copy and paste the line from your web browser because the single quote character that is pasted isn’t the same that you would type. Just delete the ’s from the command and type them back in manually. Also, it appears that you might have an extra ‘ just before the //’ at the end of your command.

I used James’ version, retyping the single quotes, and it ran perfectly, thanks!

By: daniel

daniel — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:17:05 +0000

In 1600 files want to replace the strings “text: ” by nothing, so i give the command

$ grep -R -l ‘text: ‘ . | sort | uniq | xargs perl -pi~ -e ’s/text: ‘//’

and then Ubuntu Feisty says
Unrecognized character \xE2 at -e line 1.
xargs: perl: exited with status 255; aborting

how to proceed?

By: James

James — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 14:43:42 +0000

Not sure why you run uniq on it, grep is perfectly capable of only returning unique results… And use the short options please. This should do just fine:

$ grep -rl OLDSTRING . | xargs perl -pi~ -e ’s/OLDSTRING/NEWSTRING/’

and if you want to do it sorted, files (this will even do unique results too!):

$ grep -rl OLDSTRING . | sort -u | xargs perl -pi~ -e ’s/OLDSTRING/NEWSTRING/’

and for you old school sed peeps (sed args aren’t as obscure):

$ grep -rl OLDSTRING . | xargs sed -i -e ’s/OLDSTRING/NEWSTRING/’

In all of these cases, you can replace the grep command with `find . -type f`. I’m guessing this hasn’t been performance tested. I’m also guessing for large files, just running the search and replace would be faster than scanning the file for matches, then scanning the file for matches AND replacing them.