debian find word in file and replace all instances

#Debian find word in file and replace all instances how to
#Debian find word in file and replace all instances manual

You can use any delimiter other than the slash. The following sed command replaces the third, fourth, fifth… “unix” word with “linux” word in a line. Use the combination of /1, /2 etc and /g to replace all the patterns from the nth occurrence of a pattern in a line. Replacing from nth occurrence to all occurrences in a line. The substitute flag /g (global replacement) specifies the sed command to replace all the occurrences of the string in the line. Replacing all the occurrence of the pattern in a line. The below command replaces the second occurrence of the word “unix” with “linux” in a line. Use the /1, /2 etc flags to replace the first, second occurrence of a pattern in a line. Replacing the nth occurrence of a pattern in a line. The “unix” is the search pattern and the “linux” is the replacement string.īy default, the sed command replaces the first occurrence of the pattern in each line and it won’t replace the second, third…occurrence in the line.Ģ. Here the “s” specifies the substitution operation. The below simple sed command replaces the word “unix” with “linux” in the file. Sed command is mostly used to replace the text in a file. Here I will describe the features of sed with examples.Ĭonsider the below text file as an input. You can do many things apart from replacing text with sed. Most people never learn its power they just simply use sed to replace text. Whenever you want to make changes to the file automatically, sed comes in handy to do this.

#Debian find word in file and replace all instances manual

Take a look at the grep manual and the sed manual for more information.Sed is a Stream Editor used for modifying the files in unix (or linux). For example, say you want to skip the tests/ directory: grep -RiIl -exclude-dir=tests 'search' | xargs sed 's/search/replace/g'Įxclude multiple directories by wrapping them into curly braces, like so: grep -RiIl -exclude-dir= 'search' | xargs sed 's/search/replace/g'īoth grep and sed support regular expressions, so you can search with grep given a specific pattern and then replace the text with sed given another one. You can add the -exclude-dir= parameter to grep if you want to skip a specific directory while searching for files.

#Debian find word in file and replace all instances how to

replace), the g instructs the command to replace all occurrences.įine tuning 1: how to exclude directories while searching

s/search/replace/g - this is the substitution command.

In the current snippet I'm using it to replace text with the following parameters: Sed is a glorious Unix utility that transforms text. So in this example the output of grep is passed to the next command sed as its argument. This is a little command-line utility that takes what receives in input and passes it as argument to another program.

l - print results as a simple list of file names.

R - perform a recursive search, also across symbolic links.Here I'm invoking it with the following parameters: Grep is a utility for searching for strings through multiple text files.

Let me now dissect it and take a quick look at the different tools in use. Assuming that you want to search for the string search through multiple files and replace it with replace, this is the one-liner: grep -RiIl 'search' | xargs sed -i 's/search/replace/g' After a bit of research I've come up with a nice solution. Often times I need to search and replace a string of text across multiple files in my Linux box.