How to do a recursive find/replace of a string with awk or sed?

bash sed awk replace
Tedd picture Tedd · Oct 17, 2009 · Viewed 555.8k times · Source

How do I find and replace every occurrence of:

subdomainA.example.com

with 

subdomainB.example.com

in every text file under the /home/www/ directory tree recursively?

Answer

Nikita Fedyashev picture Nikita Fedyashev · Oct 17, 2009 
find /home/www \( -type d -name .git -prune \) -o -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

-print0 tells find to print each of the results separated by a null character, rather than a new line. In the unlikely event that your directory has files with newlines in the names, this still lets xargs work on the correct filenames.

\( -type d -name .git -prune \) is an expression which completely skips over all directories named .git. You could easily expand it, if you use SVN or have other folders you want to preserve -- just match against more names. It's roughly equivalent to -not -path .git, but more efficient, because rather than checking every file in the directory, it skips it entirely. The -o after it is required because of how -prune actually works.

For more information, see man find.

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