How to Replace The Word "Hello" with "Goodbye" in Every File in This Directory, and Also Recursively

How do I replace the word hello with goodbye in every file in this directory, and also recursively?

find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/hello/goodbye/g' {} +

Find and replace with sed in directory and sub directories

Your find should look like that to avoid sending directory names to sed:

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/apple/orange/g' {} \;

How to replace string in files recursively via sed or awk?

If you need to find and replace text in files - sed seems to be the best command line solution.

Search for a string in the text file and replace:

sed -i 's/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/' file.name

Or, if you need to process multiple occurencies of PATTERN in file, add g key

sed -i 's/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/g' file.name

For multiple files processing - redirect list of files to sed:

echo "${filesList}" | xargs sed -i ...

How to replace multiple substrings of a string?

Here is a short example that should do the trick with regular expressions:

import re

rep = {"condition1": "", "condition2": "text"} # define desired replacements here

# use these three lines to do the replacement
rep = dict((re.escape(k), v) for k, v in rep.iteritems()) 
#Python 3 renamed dict.iteritems to dict.items so use rep.items() for latest versions
pattern = re.compile("|".join(rep.keys()))
text = pattern.sub(lambda m: rep[re.escape(m.group(0))], text)

For example:

>>> pattern.sub(lambda m: rep[re.escape(m.group(0))], "(condition1) and --condition2--")
'() and --text--'

Search and replace in a console

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html

It's cranky and difficult, but it's one way to do it.

Here's an example:

sed -i 's/ugly/beautiful/g' /home/bruno/old-friends/sue.txt

This replaces ugly with beautiful in sue.txt.

Recursive search and replace in text files on Mac and Linux

OS X uses a mix of BSD and GNU tools, so best always check the documentation (although I had it that less didn't even conform to the OS X manpage):

https://web.archive.org/web/20170808213955/https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Darwin/
Reference/ManPages/man1/sed.1.html

sed takes the argument after -i as the extension for backups. Provide an empty string (-i '') for no backups.

The following should do:

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i '' s/this/that/g {} +

The -type f is just good practice; sed will complain if you give it a directory or so.

-exec is preferred over xargs; you needn't bother with -print0 or anything.

The {} + at the end means that find will append all results as arguments to one instance of the called command, instead of re-running it for each result. (One exception is when the maximal number of command-line arguments allowed by the OS is breached; in that case find will run more than one instance.)

If you get an error like "invalid byte sequence," it might help to force the standard locale by adding LC_ALL=C at the start of the command, like so:

LC_ALL=C find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i '' s/this/that/g {} +

How to unstage large number of files without deleting the content

git reset

If all you want is to undo an overzealous "git add" run:

git reset

Your changes will be unstaged and ready for you to re-add as you please.

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DO NOT RUN git reset --hard.

It will not only unstage your added files, but will revert any changes you made in your working directory. If you created any new files in working directory, it will not delete them though.

Insert a line of text in the end of a function

With GNU sed:

sed '/^hello()/,/^}/s/^}/   insert new line of text "good bye" here\n&/' file

If you want to edit your file "in place" use sed's option -i.

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