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

Question

Suppose I have many files in this directory. I want to replace "hello" with "goodbye" everywhere, also recursively

Do you care if substrings are also replaced? All current answers will replace words like "shellout" with "sgoodbyeut". I would think they should deal with token replacement only. — Alex M, Feb 14 '11 at 19:46
Take a look at this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6758963/find-and-replace-with-sed-in-directory-and-sub-directories — rowana, Apr 26 '16 at 10:37

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 14 '11 at 19:41

10

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

answered Feb 14 '11 at 19:41

Antti

You may want to check that pattern. You may end up with instances of sgoodbyeil! – johnsyweb Feb 14 '11 at 21:08

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 14 '11 at 19:41

1

for file in $(find ./) ; do sed -e 's/hello/goodbye/g' $file > tmp && mv tmp $file ; done

answered Feb 14 '11 at 19:41

Fred

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 14 '11 at 19:46

0

You can use a perl one-liner

perl -p -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/g' `find ./ -name *.html`

edited Feb 14 '11 at 19:46

Thomas

answered Feb 14 '11 at 19:43

DrNoone

I took the liberty to fix the formatting... essential backticks were getting lost. – Thomas Feb 14 '11 at 19:47

3 Answers3