How to do a recursive find/replace of a string wit

Question

How do I find and replace every occurrence of:

subdomainA.example.com

with

subdomainB.example.com

in every text file under the /home/www/ directory tree recursively?

Answer 1

For replace all occurrences in a git repository you can use:

git ls-files -z | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

See List files in local git repo? for other options to list all files in a repository. The -z options tells git to separate the file names with a zero byte, which assures that xargs (with the option -0) can separate filenames, even if they contain spaces or whatnot.

Answer 2

For anyone using silver searcher (ag)

ag SearchString -l0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/SearchString/Replacement/g'

Since ag ignores git/hg/svn file/folders by default, this is safe to run inside a repository.

Answer 3

just to avoid to change also

• NearlysubdomainA.example.com
• subdomainA.example.comp.other

but still

• subdomainA.example.com.IsIt.good

(maybe not good in the idea behind domain root)

find /home/www/ -type f -exec sed -i 's/\bsubdomainA\.example\.com\b/\1subdomainB.example.com\2/g' {} \;

Answer 4

According to this blog post:

find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/oldtext/newtext/g;'

Answer 5

To cut down on files to recursively sed through, you could grep for your string instance:

grep -rl <oldstring> /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s^<oldstring>^<newstring>^g

If you run man grep you'll notice you can also define an --exlude-dir="*.git" flag if you want to omit searching through .git directories, avoiding git index issues as others have politely pointed out.

Leading you to:

grep -rl --exclude-dir="*.git" <oldstring> /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s^<oldstring>^<newstring>^g

Answer 6

You can use awk to solve this as below,

for file in `find /home/www -type f`
do
   awk '{gsub(/subdomainA.example.com/,"subdomainB.example.com"); print $0;}' $file > ./tempFile && mv ./tempFile $file;
done

hope this will help you !!!