Replace a string in several text files : replace, linux, text, string, files

May 17, 2008 03:23am pdt

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06.21.2000 at 04:39PM PDT, ID: 10515858

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6.6

Replace a string in several text files

Zones: Linux, Server Side Includes (SSI), Linux Distributions

Tags: replace, linux, text, string, files

I want to replace a string with another string in several text files. I tried the following command which I read from a Linux book, but it doesn't work. Can anyone give me some help?

[Linux]#find ./ -type f -exec sed 's/string1/string2' {} \;

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Question Stats

Zone: OS

Question Asked By: dong

Solution Provided By: markt9

Participating Experts: 5

Solution Grade: B

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06.21.2000 at 09:04PM PDT, ID: 3037295

markt9:

Wow, I'm supprised how hard this one is to figure out. Here is an alternate method:

cd myfiles
for fl in *.txt; do
mv $fl $fl.old
sed 's/January/February/g' $fl.old > $fl
rm -f $fl.old
done

The first line of the sequence simply goes to the directory containing the files which need to be changed. The second line above begins a shell for loop which will execute the following commands once for each *.txt file in the directory. The third line adds an '.old' extension to all of the existing files which need to be changed, and the fourth line performs the search-and-replace on the file in question. The sixth line closes the loop and begins execution of the command.

I couldn't figure out a one liner to do it... I kept getting sed: -e expression #1, char 17: Unterminated `s' command errors....

Pay attention to your book's example, ', `, " all have different meanings in unix...

Accepted Solution

06.21.2000 at 09:17PM PDT, ID: 3037395

markt9:

or maybe:

To do an entire directory tree, use the Unix utility find, like so
(thanks to Jim Dennis <jadestar@rahul.net> for this script):

#! /bin/sh
# filename: replaceall
find . -type f -name '*.txt' -print | while read i
do
sed 's|foo|bar|g' $i > $i.tmp && mv $i.tmp $i
done

This previous shell script recurses through the directory tree,
finding only files in the directory (not symbolic links, which will
be encountered by the shell command "for file in *.txt", above). To
preserve file permissions and make backup copies, use the 2-line cp
routine of the earlier script instead of "sed ... && mv ...". By
replacing the sed command 's|foo|bar|g' with something like

sed "s|$1|$2|g" ${i}.bak > $i

using double quotes instead of single quotes, the user can also
employ positional parameters on the shell script command tail, thus
reusing the script from time to time. For example,

replaceall East West

would modify all your *.txt files in the current directory.

06.21.2000 at 10:02PM PDT, ID: 3037812

dong:

Comment accepted as answer

04.16.2003 at 06:01AM PDT, ID: 8340561

Fzzy:

i know this q is old, but here's and easy way to do this in one line(if you have perl installed):

perl -pi -e "s/search/replace/g;" *.txt

you could use find or xargs to get fancy with finding the files you want to change.

10.29.2003 at 09:49AM PST, ID: 9643890

takwing:

Can I use a variable as the string instead?
ie.
sed 's/string1/$string2/g' $fl.old > $fl
where $string2 is a variable,

I find it doesn't work

05.22.2004 at 05:33PM PDT, ID: 11135770

sreed888:

The sed substitution has a syntax error. It is missing the final '/' and should be written as:
find ./ -type f -exec sed 's/string1/string2/' {} \;

I don't have my Linux box up right now but this works fine in OpenBSD and cygwin.

It will only change the first occurance of string1 on each line so you might want to add 'g' to the end of the substitution command to get all occurances:
find ./ -type f -exec sed 's/string1/string2/g' {} \;

And you might not want to sed every file but just some that have certain names or extensions:
find ./ -name "*.txt" -exec sed 's/string1/string2/g' {} \;

05.23.2004 at 06:36AM PDT, ID: 11137542

sreed888:

Oops, I forgot to include the -i so sed edits in-place:
find ./ -type f -exec sed -i 's/string1/string2/' {} \;

07.26.2005 at 09:01PM PDT, ID: 14533558

MikePutnam:

In response to :

"Comment from Fzzy
Date: 04/16/2003 08:01AM CDT
you could use find or xargs to get fancy with finding the files you want to change."

I've found this to work well as a one liner, recursive, search and replace for Linux.

find ./ -type f | xargs perl -pi -w -e 's/SEARCH/REPLACE/g;'

It is handy for mass updates to websites. Be careful and use your grep -r 'SEARCH' *.* first to make sure you are only grabbing the files you want.

-Mike Putnam

20080236-EE-VQP-29