HOW TO : Find files, search for content in them, replace the content

The title pretty much says it all :). Here is a quick  one liner, using multiple tools, to look for files in a directory, search for certain content in them and replace them with other content

[code]find -type f | xargs grep -l ORIGINAL_CONTENT | xargs perl -p -i -e ‘s/ORIGINAL_CONTENT/NEW_CONTENT/g’ [/code]

You can theoretically take out the grep (second command) and directly pipe the find output to perl and get the same outcome.

Going over list of the options used

find

  • “-type f” lists all objects of type file in the directory (and sub directories)

grep

  • “-l” lists the names of the files (with relative path) which have the text ORIGINAL_CONTENT in them

perl

  • “-p” forces perl to loop through requests. In this case files
  • “-e” tells perl that the next argument is a perl statement
  • “-i” tells perls to edit the file in place (i.e. no need for an output file)