Find and replace with sed in directory and sub directories

I run this command to find and replace all occurrences of 'apple' with 'orange' in all files in root of my site:

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

But it doesn't go through sub directories.

What is wrong with this command?

Here are some lines of output of find ./:

./index.php ./header.php ./fpd ./fpd/font ./fpd/font/desktop.ini ./fpd/font/courier.php ./fpd/font/symbol.php 

8 Answers

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

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

For larger s&r tasks it's better and faster to use grep and xargs, so, for example;

grep -rl 'apples' /dir_to_search_under | xargs sed -i 's/apples/oranges/g' 

Since there are also macOS folks reading this one (as I did), the following code worked for me (on 10.14)

egrep -rl '<pattern>' <dir> | xargs -I@ sed -i '' 's/<arg1>/<arg2>/g' @ 

All other answers using -i and -e do not work on macOS.

Source

This worked for me:

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i '' 's#NEEDLE#REPLACEMENT#' *.php {} \; 

grep -e apple your_site_root/**/*.* -s -l | xargs sed -i "" "s|apple|orage|" 

I think we can do this with one line simple command

for i in `grep -rl eth0 . 2> /dev/null`; do sed -i ‘s/eth0/eth1/’ $i; done 

Refer to this page.

Found a great program for this called ruplacer

Usage

ruplacer before_text after_text # prints out list of things it will replace ruplacer before_text after_text --go # executes the replacements 

It also respects .gitignore so it won't mess up your .git or node_modules directories (find . by default will go into your .git directory and can corrupt it!!!)

In linuxOS:

sed -i 's/textSerch/textReplace/g' namefile 

if "sed" not work try :

perl -i -pe 's/textSerch/textReplace/g' namefile