Recursive search and replace in text files on Mac and Linux

Question

In the linux shell, the following command will recursively search and replace all instances of \'this\' with \'that\' (I don\'t have a Linux shell in front of me, but it sho

Answer 1

I used this format - but...I found I had to run it three or more times to get it to actually change every instance which I found extremely strange. Running it once would change some in each file but not all. Running exactly the same string two-four times would catch all instances.

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i '' s/thistext/newtext/ {} +