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

Another option would be to just use perl with globstar.

Enabling shopt -s globstar in your .bashrc (or wherever) allows the ** glob pattern to match all sub-directories and files recursively.

Thus using perl -pXe 's/SEARCH/REPLACE/g' -i ** will recursively replace SEARCH with REPLACE.

The -X flag tells perl to "disable all warnings" - which means that it won't complain about directories.

The globstar also allows you to do things like sed -i 's/SEARCH/REPLACE/g' **/*.ext if you wanted to replace SEARCH with REPLACE in all child files with the extension .ext.