Search and replace a word in directory and its subdirectories

Question

I need to find and replace a word in all the files across a directory and its subdirectories.

I used this line of code:

perl -pi -w -e 's/foo/bar/g;' *.*

But it changes the words only in files in the current directory and doesn't affect the subdirectories.

How can I change the word on every directory and subdirectory?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 08 '17 at 14:36

1

You could do a pure Perl solution that recursively traverses your directory structure, but that'd require a lot more code to write.

The easier solution is to use the find command which can be told to find all files and run a command against them.

find . -type f -exec perl -pi -w -e 's/foo/bar/g;' \{\} \;

(I've escaped the {} and ; just in case but you might not need this)

answered Dec 08 '17 at 14:36

Chris Turner

This my friend did the trick. Thank you very much! I am waiting now to mark this as the right answer. Thank you – Aristeidis Karavas Dec 08 '17 at 14:38

Tiago Lopo · Answer 2 · 2017-12-08T14:40:16.780

0

Try that:

find -type f | xargs -r -I {} perl -pi -w -e 's/foo/bar/g;' {}

That should run recursively

In case your file name contains space:

find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 -I {} perl -pi -w -e 's/foo/bar/g;' {}

edited Dec 08 '17 at 14:40

answered Dec 08 '17 at 14:34

Tiago Lopo

1

no need to use xargs unless `-exec` doesn't provide a feature you want, for ex: parallel... see https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/24954/when-is-xargs-needed and also https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/321697/why-is-looping-over-finds-output-bad-practice – Sundeep Dec 08 '17 at 14:43

2 Answers2