find and replace a search string recursively in files

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi ,

I have a directory structure as dir and subdirectories and files under it and so on.now I need to find the files which contain the search string under every dir and subdir and replace .

my search string is like

searchstring=/a/b

string to be replaced=/a/c/b

please help.

many thanks,
mohan

2

i think this will do
sed 's/\/a\/b/\/a\/c\/b/g' filename

3

make sure your files are in source control before trying this!

sed -i 's/from/to/g' `find . -name \*.ext`

4

hi,

thanks for the replies. i have used them but not working..
see the code i have used :

echo "Enter the FullPackage DIR path[/eur/development ......] "
read PKG_DIR

echo " Enter the Source Pattern to be replaced "
read SS

echo " Enter the Target Pattern "
read TS

list=`find $PKG_DIR -type f`

for file in ${list}
do

#in the below command colon is a separator
sed 's:"${SS}":"${TS}":g' ${file} > /tmp/temp.txt

mv /tmp/temp.txt ${file}
done

what is wrong with my code ?

thanks for the help

5

Use double quotes instead of single quotes in your sed statement, the single quotes prevent the shell to expand the variables:

sed "s:"${SS}":"${TS}":g" ${file} > /tmp/temp.txt
6

hi franky,

thanks a lot for the help. working fine..

thanks
mohan

7

Cheers, this does work fine as long as the filenames do not contain spaces!

How can I adapt it to handle spaces in filenames correctly?

H.

8

Try to quote the find command like this:

sed -i 's/from/to/g' "`find . -name \*.ext`"

Regards