Take a look at the grep manual and the sed manual for more information. For example, say you want to skip the tests/ directory: grep -RiIl -exclude-dir=tests 'search' | xargs sed 's/search/replace/g'Įxclude multiple directories by wrapping them into curly braces, like so: grep -RiIl -exclude-dir= 'search' | xargs sed 's/search/replace/g'īoth grep and sed support regular expressions, so you can search with grep given a specific pattern and then replace the text with sed given another one. Assuming that you want to search for the string search through multiple files and replace it with replace, this is the one-liner.

After a bit of research Ive come up with a nice solution. You can add the -exclude-dir= parameter to grep if you want to skip a specific directory while searching for files. Often times I need to search and replace a string of text across multiple files in my Linux box. replace), the g instructs the command to replace all occurrences.įine tuning 1: how to exclude directories while searching

s/search/replace/g - this is the substitution command.

In the current snippet I'm using it to replace text with the following parameters: Sed is a glorious Unix utility that transforms text. So in this example the output of grep is passed to the next command sed as its argument. This is a little command-line utility that takes what receives in input and passes it as argument to another program.

l - print results as a simple list of file names.

R - perform a recursive search, also across symbolic links.

Here I'm invoking it with the following parameters: Grep is a utility for searching for strings through multiple text files. Let me now dissect it and take a quick look at the different tools in use.

Assuming that you want to search for the string search through multiple files and replace it with replace, this is the one-liner: grep -RiIl 'search' | xargs sed -i 's/search/replace/g' After a bit of research I've come up with a nice solution. Often times I need to search and replace a string of text across multiple files in my Linux box.

Putty search files for text string