Change multiple files

sed
shantanuo picture shantanuo · May 4, 2012 · Viewed 204.7k times · Source

The following command is correctly changing the contents of 2 files.

sed -i 's/abc/xyz/g' xaa1 xab1

But what I need to do is to change several such files dynamically and I do not know the file names. I want to write a command that will read all the files from current directory starting with xa* and sed should change the file contents.

Answer

ealfonso picture ealfonso · Jun 8, 2015

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the -exec argument to find, which is intended for this type of use-case, although it will start a process for each matching file name:

find . -type f -name 'xa*' -exec sed -i 's/asd/dsg/g' {} \;

Alternatively, one could use xargs, which will invoke fewer processes:

find . -type f -name 'xa*' | xargs sed -i 's/asd/dsg/g'

Or more simply use the + exec variant instead of ; in find to allow find to provide more than one file per subprocess call:

find . -type f -name 'xa*' -exec sed -i 's/asd/dsg/g' {} +

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