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 think that without using -exec you can simply provide /dev/null as at least one argument in case nothing is found:

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