Hello, I am Sean Murphy » find/replace http://iamseanmurphy.com Thoughts, news, code by Sean Murphy Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:37:51 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Recursive Find and Replace With grep and Perl http://iamseanmurphy.com/2009/04/11/recursive-find-and-replace-with-grep-and-perl/ http://iamseanmurphy.com/2009/04/11/recursive-find-and-replace-with-grep-and-perl/#comments Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:51:56 +0000 Sean Murphy http://iamseanmurphy.com/2009/04/11/recursive-find-and-replace-with-grep-and-perl/ I thought it might be a nice idea to start posting useful little commands and bits of code every now and then–ones I’ve found to be particularly useful. So here’s the first one, recursive find and replace. A masterfully crafted regular expression paired with this command can save you hours of tedious work.


This will search all files recursively for SEARCH_STRING and replace all occurrences of SEARCH_STRING with REPLACE_STRING throughout each unique file found. It also creates a backup of each modified file so that FILE is backed-up as FILE~ (with a tilde).

grep -R --files-with-matches 'SEARCH_STRING' . | sort | uniq | xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/SEARCH_STRING/REPLACE_STRING/'
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