How to grep and replace

Question

I need to recursively search for a specified string within all files and subdirectories within a directory and replace this string with another string.

I know that t

Answer 1

Other solutions mix regex syntaxes. To use perl/PCRE patterns for both search and replace, and only process matching files, this works quite well:

grep -rlIZPi 'match1' | xargs -0r perl -pi -e 's/match2/replace/gi;'

match1 and match2 are usually identical but match1 can be simplified to remove more advanced features that are only relevant to the substitution, e.g. capturing groups.

Translation: grep recursively and list matching filenames, each separated by nul to protect any special characters; pipe any filenames to xargs which is expecting a nul-separated list; if any filenames are received, pass them to perl to perform the actual substitutions.

For case-sensitive matching, drop the i flag from grep and the i pattern modifier from the s/// expression, but not the i flag from perl itself. Remove the I flag from grep to include binary files.