How to find and replace all occurrences of a string recursively in a directory tree?

Question

Using just grep and sed, how do I replace all occurrences of:

a.example.com

with

b.example.com

within a

Answer 1

Try this:

grep -rl 'SearchString' ./ | xargs sed -i 's/REPLACESTRING/WITHTHIS/g'

grep -rl will recursively search for the SEARCHSTRING in the directories ./ and will replace the strings using sed.

Ex:

Replacing a name TOM with JERRY using search string as SWATKATS in directory CARTOONNETWORK

grep -rl 'SWATKATS' CARTOONNETWORK/ | xargs sed -i 's/TOM/JERRY/g'

This will replace TOM with JERRY in all the files and subdirectories under CARTOONNETWORK wherever it finds the string SWATKATS.