Using grep and sed to find and replace a string

Question

I am using the following to search a directory recursively for specific string and replace it with another:

grep -rl oldstr path | xargs sed -i \'s/oldstr/ne         


        

Answer 1

I have taken Vlad's idea and changed it a little bit. Instead of

grep -rl oldstr path | xargs sed -i 's/oldstr/newstr/g' /dev/null

Which yields

sed: couldn't edit /dev/null: not a regular file

I'm doing in 3 different connections to the remote server

touch deleteme
grep -rl oldstr path | xargs sed -i 's/oldstr/newstr/g' ./deleteme
rm deleteme

Although this is less elegant and requires 2 more connections to the server (maybe there's a way to do it all in one line) it does the job efficiently as well