Search and Replace Text in All Files of a Linux Directory

How to replace a string in multiple files in linux command line

cd /path/to/your/folder
sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' *

Occurrences of "foo" will be replaced with "bar".

On BSD systems like macOS, you need to provide a backup extension like -i '.bak' or else "risk corruption or partial content" per the manpage.

cd /path/to/your/folder
sed -i '.bak' 's/foo/bar/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' {} \;

Search and replace text in all files of a linux directory

The following will do it:

sed -i 's/old_link/new_link/g' file...

Don't forget to escape any slashes, dots, and any other regex special chars in the link addresses with a backslash.

How to find all files containing specific text (string) on Linux?

Do the following:

grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e 'pattern'

-r or -R is recursive,
-n is line number, and
-w stands for match the whole word.
-l (lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.
-e is the pattern used during the search

Along with these, --exclude, --include, --exclude-dir flags could be used for efficient searching:

This will only search through those files which have .c or .h extensions:
```
grep --include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
```
This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:
```
grep --exclude=\*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
```
For directories it's possible to exclude one or more directories using the --exclude-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:
```
grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/search/' -e "pattern"
```

This works very well for me, to achieve almost the same purpose like yours.

For more options, see man grep.

How do I replace text in all files containing specific text on Linux?

Yes, there is a command in Linux that replaces the text in all files. Try:

find "/path/mypath" -type f -exec sed -i "s/mypattern/mypattern2/g" {} \;

as U880D proposes. No need to fetch first the matching files with grep, sed is able to search and to replace.

Find and replace words and special characters from specific files from linux

You have extra backslashes to escape special characters. Please try:

# find . -type f -name "gnuplot_RTre_*.gnplt" -exec sed -i 's/set xrange \[0:20]/set xrange \[0:3]/g' {} +
# The backslash in the REPLACEMENT above is unnecessary, although harmless.
# Please adopt the following instead.
find . -type f -name "gnuplot_RTre_*.gnplt" -exec sed -i 's/set xrange \[0:20]/set xrange [0:3]/g' {} +

In sed, the characters $.*[\^ need to be escaped with a backslash to be treated as literal.

[EDIT]

The right square bracket "]" is usually not a special character in regex and
you do not have to esacape it:

echo "[abc]" | sed 's/]/*/g'
=> [abc*

But "]" behaves as a metacharacter if preceded by an unescaped left square bracket "[" to compose a character class.

echo "[abc]abc" | sed 's/[abc]/*/g'
=> [***]***

In order to make "[" to be literal, we need to escape it.

echo "[abc]abc" | sed 's/\[abc]/*/g'
=> *abc

"]" can be also escaped just for visual symmetricity.

echo "[abc]abc" | sed 's/\[abc\]/*/g'
=> *abc

How to change all occurrences of a word in all files in a directory

A variation that takes into account subdirectories (untested):

find /var/www -type f -exec sed -i 's/privelages/privileges/g' {} \;

This will find all files (not directories, specified by -type f) under /var/www, and perform a sed command to replace "privelages" with "privileges" on each file it finds.

Find and Replace string in all files recursive using grep and sed

As @Didier said, you can change your delimiter to something other than /:

grep -rl $oldstring /path/to/folder | xargs sed -i s@$oldstring@$newstring@g

find and replace in multiple files on command line

there are many ways .But one of the answers would be:

find . -name '*.html' |xargs perl -pi -e 's/find/replace/g'