Unix find and replace text within all files within a directory

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May 7th, 2004, 03:10 PM

bjmazur2

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Unix find and replace text within all files within a directory

I am trying to do a search on an entire directory, finding all the instances of the text "applicationX" and replacing all instances with the text "applicationY".

I created the following to find all instances and print the files that contain the search text. But now I don't know how to replace the text.

find . -type f -exec grep "applicationX" {} \; -print

Please help..thanks

May 8th, 2004, 10:34 AM

Scorpions4ever

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Here's something I cooked up. The grep -il statement finds all instances of Hello in files ending in txt (i = ignore case, , l = only list the filename). The file names are passed to sed, which runs a regular expression to change all instances of Hello to Goodbye. Since sed doesn't overwrite a file, I redirected the output to a temp file and then renamed it back to the original file name.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
                          
for file in $(grep -il "Hello" *.txt)
do
sed -e "s/Hello/Goodbye/ig" $file > /tmp/tempfile.tmp
mv /tmp/tempfile.tmp $file
done

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May 8th, 2004, 02:44 PM

christo

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or you could just aswell use PERLs inplace replacement as in the following one-liner:

find /path/to/start/from/ -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/applicationX/applicationY/g'

christo

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May 10th, 2004, 10:23 AM

bjmazur2

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The second solution worked perfectly.

The first one actually will delete all the contents of the file if there is more than one instance of the search string in the file. I actually had played around with another variation that did the same thing:

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -print | while read i
do
sed 's|applicationx|applicationy|g' $i > $i.tmp && mv $i.tmp $i
done

Maybe a little fiddling around would get a solution.

June 6th, 2005, 10:22 AM

d-woo

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To replace all instances of a string in a directory (subdirectories included) do:

Code:

perl -e "s/FIND/REPLACE/g;" -pi.save $(find path/to/DIRECTORY -type f)

The above will make a backup temp file of your original
If you do not want a temp file with the .save extension then do:

Code:

perl -e "s/FIND/REPLACE/g;" -pi $(find path/to/DIRECTORY -type f)

--------------------
Example:
You want to replace all instances of the word "design" with "dezine" in the directory /public_html/company/info

you can execute the command from document root as

Code:

perl -e "s/design/dezine/g;" -pi.save $(find public_html/company/info -type f)

or you can execute the command from public_html/company/ (a directory above) as:

Code:

perl -e "s/design/dezine/g;" -pi.save $(find info -type f)

------------------------------

The above commands will search all files (.gif, .jpg, .htm, .html, .txt) so you might see some error messages "Can't open *.gif", etc)

Simplified

To search just files of type, .htm without a backup file in the current directory only (no subdirectories) you could use:

Code:

perl -pi -e 's/design/dezine/g' *.htm

March 6th, 2008, 03:56 PM

gare

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Scorpions4ever

Code:

#!/bin/sh
                          
for file in $(grep -il "Hello" *.txt)
do
sed -e "s/Hello/Goodbye/ig" $file > /tmp/tempfile.tmp
mv /tmp/tempfile.tmp $file
done

very cool script. Thanks for posting. I modified it a bit, and this seems to work pretty well:

Code:

# *****************************************************************************************
# find_and_replace_in_files.sh
# This script does a recursive, case sensitive directory search and replace of files
# To make a case insensitive search replace, use the -i switch in the grep call
# uses a startdirectory parameter so that you can run it outside of specified directory - else this script will modify itself!
# *****************************************************************************************

!/bin/bash
# **************** Change Variables Here ************
startdirectory="/home/gare/tmp/tmp2"
searchterm="search"
replaceterm="replaceTerm"
# **********************************************************

echo "******************************************"
echo "* Search and Replace in Files Version .1 *"
echo "******************************************"

        for file in $(grep -l -R $searchterm $startdirectory)
          do
           sed -e "s/$searchterm/$replaceterm/ig" $file > /tmp/tempfile.tmp
           mv /tmp/tempfile.tmp $file
           echo "Modified: " $file
        done

echo " *** Yay! All Done! *** "

June 28th, 2008, 06:42 PM

subverted

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Script Modified for User Input

I modified the Scorpions4ever script so it allows for user input so that you dont have to alter the script to do a search.

edit: I changed the script to work with Zenity in Gnome.

Code:

#!/bin/sh

echo enter file name with extension
read NAME
echo enter word to replace
read FIND
echo enter word that replaces
read REPLACE                         
for file in $(grep -il "$FIND" $NAME)
do
sed -e "s/$FIND/$REPLACE/ig" $file > /tmp/tempfile.tmp
mv /tmp/tempfile.tmp $file
done

Only thing I can't figure out is how to run it from Nautilus Actions Configuration. I want it to be on the right click menu so that you can select multiple files and do batch replacements. I tried adding "gnome-terminal" to the beginning of the script but it doesn't work and my bash writing skills are minimal. I only know variable juggling.

I tried adding this line to the end before "done"

Code:

gnome-terminal -e /home/$USER/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/scriptname

This actually popped up a terminal window and it seemingly went through the script operations but it didn't change the file I selected. Is there some way to name the file you select as a variable in the script?

I want it to be so that I can select multiple files with the mouse and right click with a simple "find and replace" function for batch editing, sort of like the batch-resize option that I added through Nautilus Actions Configuration Editor.

With Zenity, provides GUI question box:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

szAnswer0=$(zenity --entry --text "Enter file names and paths" --entry-text $PWD);
szAnswer1=$(zenity --entry --text "Enter word to replace:");
szAnswer2=$(zenity --entry --text "Enter word that replaces:");                     
for file in $(grep -il "$szAnswer1" $szAnswer0)
do
sed -e "s/$szAnswer1/$szAnswer2/ig" $file > /tmp/tempfile.tmp
mv /tmp/tempfile.tmp $file
done

July 1st, 2008, 11:58 PM

ghostdog74

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Code:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/Application/whatever/g'

July 2nd, 2008, 01:15 AM

subverted

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Nedit

yea, probably quicker to use NEDIT. It has a fantastic search and replace function, though a script to run a right click option on the mouse in nautilus is still interesting for search and replace.

#10

July 2nd, 2008, 05:56 PM

subverted

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Thanks

Quote:

Originally Posted by ghostdog74

Code:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/Application/whatever/g'

Nice one. I changed it to a bash script like so:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
szAnswer1=$(zenity --entry --text "Enter word to replace:");
szAnswer2=$(zenity --entry --text "Enter word that replaces:");   
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "s/$szAnswer1/$szAnswer2/g"

Then I moved the script file to /bin so it could be called as a single file name in terminal. Then I called it through Nautilus-Actions conf editor which added it to right click menu. Only problem is it doesn't work on desktop. It only shows up inside a directory, which is just as well, and it replaces the term for every file in the directory without calling a specific file.

#11

July 20th, 2008, 10:17 AM

onagar

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In that example - how to filter specific lines?

In this example:
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/Application/whatever/g'

How can I filter that it will replace only lines starting with the string "#include"

I need to replace some string as above but only on lines starting with the "#include" string.

Thanks in advance,

Ofer

#12

February 18th, 2009, 10:04 PM

D0T-C0M

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Hi Everyone. I just joined. what a wealth of info here. I was looking for something very similar to what these scripts do. I have a YaBB forum where I need to go into hundreds of *.vars files and search for a text string and if it finds it I want to replace the whole line not just the search string. Optionally it could report back a list of *.vars files that it did not find the search string in.

thanks
DC

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