1. Replacing all occurrences of one string with another in all files in the current directory:
These are for cases where you know that the directory contains only regular files and that you want to process all non-hidden files. If that is not the case, use the approaches in 2.
All sed solutions in this answer assume GNU sed. If using FreeBSD or OS/X, replace -i with -i ‘‘. Also note that the use of the -i switch with any version of sed has certain filesystem security implications and is inadvisable in any script which you plan to distribute in any way.
Non recursive, files in this directory only:
sed -i --‘s/foo/bar/g‘*perl -i -pe ‘s/foo/bar/g‘./*
Recursive, regular files (including hidden ones) in this and all subdirectories
find .-type f -exec sed -i ‘s/foo/bar/g‘{}+
If you are using zsh:
sed -i --‘s/foo/bar/g‘**/*(D.)
(may fail if the list is too big, see zargs to work around).
Bash can‘t check directly for regular files, a loop is needed (braces avoid setting the options globally):
(shopt -s globstar dotglob;forfile in **;doif[[-f $file ]]&&[[-w $file ]];then
sed -i --‘s/foo/bar/g‘"$file"fi
done
)
The files are selected when they are actual files (-f) and they are writable (-w).
4. Multiple replace operations: replace with different strings
You can combine sed commands:
sed -i ‘s/foo/bar/g; s/baz/zab/g; s/Alice/Joan/g‘file
Be aware that order matters (sed ‘s/foo/bar/g; s/bar/baz/g‘ will substitute foo with baz).
or Perl commands
perl -i -pe ‘s/foo/bar/g; s/baz/zab/g; s/Alice/Joan/g‘file
If you have a large number of patterns, it is easier to save your patterns and their replacements in a sed script file:
#! /usr/bin/sed -fs/foo/bar/g
s/baz/zab/g
Or, if you have too many pattern pairs for the above to be feasible, you can read pattern pairs from a file (two space separated patterns, $pattern and $replacement, per line):
whileread -r pattern replacement;dosed -i "s/$pattern/$replacement/"file
done
That will be quite slow for long lists of patterns and large data files so you might want to read the patterns and create a sed script from them instead. The following assumes a delimiter separates a list of MATCHREPLACE pairs occurring one-per-line in the file patterns.txt :
sed ‘s| *\([^ ]*\) *\([^ ]*\).*|s/\1/\2/g|‘outfile
The above format is largely arbitrary and, for example, doesn‘t allow for a in either ofMATCH or REPLACE. The method is very general though: basically, if you can create an output stream which looks like a sed script, then you can source that stream as a sed script by specifying sed‘s script file as -stdin.
You can combine and concatenate multiple scripts in similar fashion:
SOME_PIPELINE |sed -e‘#some expression script‘-f./script_file -f--e‘#more inline expressions‘./actual_edit_file >./outfile
A POSIX sed will concatenate all scripts into one in the order they appear on the command-line. None of these need end in a \newline.
grep can work the same way:
sed -e‘#generate a pattern list‘
When working with fixed-strings as patterns, it is good practice to escape regular expressionmetacharacters. You can do this rather easily:
sed ‘s/[]$&^*\./[]/\\&/g
s| *\([^ ]*\) *\([^ ]*\).*|s/\1/\2/g|
‘outfile
5. Multiple replace operations: replace multiple patterns with the same string
Replace any of foo, bar or baz with foobar
sed -Ei‘s/foo|bar|baz/foobar/g‘file
or
perl -i -pe ‘s/foo|bar|baz/foobar/g‘file