Recursive search and replace in text files on Mac and Linux

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 should do).

find . -name "*.txt" -print | xargs sed -i 's/this/that/g'


What will a similar command on OSX look like?

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13 Answers
13

OS X uses a mix of BSD and GNU tools, so best always check the documentation (although I had it that less didn't even conform to the OS X manpage):

less

https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/sed.1.html

sed takes the argument after -i as the extension for backups. Provide an empty string (-i '') for no backups.

-i

-i ''

The following should do:

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i '' s/this/that/ +

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i '' s/this/that/ +

The -type f is just good practice; sed will complain if you give it a directory or so.
-exec is preferred over xargs; you needn't bother with -print0 or anything.
The + at the end means that find will append all results as arguments to one instance of the called command, instead of re-running it for each result. (One exception is when the maximal number of command-line arguments allowed by the OS is breached; in that case find will run more than one instance.)

-type f

-exec

xargs

-print0

+

find

find

%

sed "s%localhost/site%blah/blah%"

sed "s/localhost/site/blah/blah/"

illegal byte sequence

LC_ALL=C find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i '' s/this/that/ +

/g

LC_ALL=C find . -type f -exec sed -i '' s/search/replace/g +

For the mac, a more similar approach would be this:

find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "" "s/form/forms/g"


find . -name '*.php' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "" "s/easyform/form360/g"

As an alternative solution, I'm using this one on Mac OSX 10.7.5

grep -ilr 'old-word' * | xargs -I@ sed -i '' 's/old-word/new-word/g' @


Credit goes to: Todd Cesere's answer

On Mac OSX 10.11.5 this works fine:

grep -rli 'old-word' * | xargs -I@ sed -i '' 's/old-word/new-word/g' @


None of the above work on OSX.

Do the following:

perl -pi -w -e 's/SEARCH_FOR/REPLACE_WITH/g;' *.txt


A version that works on both Linux and Mac OS X (by adding the -e switch to sed):

-e

sed

export LC_CTYPE=C LANG=C
find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i -e 's/this/that/g'


export LC_CTYPE=C && export LANG=C

This is my workable one. on mac OS X 10.10.4

grep -e 'this' -rl . | xargs sed -i '' 's/this/that/g'


The above ones use find will change the files that do not contain the search text (add a new line at the file end), which is verbose.

Whenever I type this command I always seem to hose it up, or forget a flag. I created a Gist on github based off of TaylanUB's answer that does a global find replace from the current directory. This is Mac OSX specific.

https://gist.github.com/nateflink/9056302

It's nice because now I just pop open a terminal then copy in:

curl -s https://gist.github.com/nateflink/9056302/raw/findreplaceosx.sh | bash -s "find-a-url.com" "replace-a-url.com"

You can get some weird byte sequence errors, so here is the full code:

#!/bin/bash
#By Nate Flink

#Invoke on the terminal like this
#curl -s https://gist.github.com/nateflink/9056302/raw/findreplaceosx.sh | bash -s "find-a-url.com" "replace-a-url.com"

if [ -z "$1" ] || [ -z "$2" ]; then
echo "Usage: ./$0 [find string] [replace string]"
exit 1
fi

FIND=$1
REPLACE=$2

#needed for byte sequence error in ascii to utf conversion on OSX
export LC_CTYPE=C;
export LANG=C;

#sed -i "" is needed by the osx version of sed (instead of sed -i)
find . -type f -exec sed -i "" "s|$FIND|$REPLACE|g" +
exit 0


https://bitbucket.org/masonicboom/serp is a go utility (i.e. cross-platform), tested on OSX, that does recursive search-and-replace for text in files within a given directory, and confirms each replacement. It's new, so might be buggy.

Usage looks like:

$ ls test
a d d2 z
$ cat test/z
hi
$ ./serp --root test --search hi --replace bye --pattern "*"
test/z: replace hi with bye? (y/[n]) y
$ cat test/z
bye


If you are using a zsh terminal you're able to use wildcard magic:

sed -i "" "s/search/high-replace/g" *.txt

sed -i "" "s/search/high-replace/g" *.txt

find . -type f | xargs sed -i '' 's/string1/string2/g'


Refer here for more info.

The command on OSX should be exactly the same as it is Unix under the pretty UI.

-print0

find

-0

xargs

-exec sed -i s/this/that/g +

-print

xargs

sed

could just say $PWD instead of "."

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