Bash find in files and replace

I nearly said the same of echo, but it's a shell builtin. The -i argument for sed doesn't exist for Solaris and I would think some other implementations however, so keep that in mind. Just spent several minutes figuring that out Note for Mac users who get an invalid command code C error For in-place replacements, BSD sed requires a file extension after the -i flag because it saves a backup file with the given extension.

For example: sed -i '. Show 3 more comments. File manipulation isn't normally done by Bash, but by programs invoked by Bash, e. John Kugelman k 66 66 gold badges silver badges bronze badges.

Alnitak Alnitak k 70 70 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. The purist in me says you can't be sure Perl will be available on the system. But that's very seldom the case nowadays. Perhaps I'm showing my age. Can you show a more complex example. CMCDragonkai Check this answer: stackoverflow. I was surprised when I stumbled over this There is a replace command which ships with the "mysql-server" package, so if you have installed it try it out: replace string abc to XYZ in files replace "abc" "XYZ" -- file.

That's because you don't have mysql-server package installed. As pointed by rayro, replace is part of it. Not relevant to this discussion. Show 2 more comments. Problem solved, well, So either awk or another language like python comes.

In this case, there are a couple of ways to do it. Is there an option to use it together with globbing as a one liner? Not as far as I know. Why put functionality into ex that the shell already has? I found this thread among others and I agree it contains the most complete answers so I'm adding mine too: sed and ed are so useful The output of grep is then piped to In the current snippet I'm using it to replace text with the following parameters: i — replace in file.

The s stands for substitute i. Sources StackOverflow - How to replace a string in multiple files in linux command line. Sam on September 09, at Hi, Thanks for sharing the tips. I have tried your command but not succeed.

I found that there should be a dot or file path at the end of grep command. Which is a bit different, see the FreeBSD man page for details. Associative arrays are a Bash 4 feature. I wrote a blog post on how to update to Bash 4. I like to write article or tutorial on various IT topics. As a programmer, you might need to work with different types of files to store data temporarily or permanently.

Sometimes, you may need to replace part of the file or modify the particular content of the file.