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

sed find grep replace
Tony picture Tony · Oct 18, 2009 · Viewed 109.4k times · Source

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

a.example.com

with

b.example.com

within a text file under the /home/user/ directory tree recursively finding and replacing all occurrences in all files in sub-directories as well.

Answer

vehomzzz picture vehomzzz · Oct 18, 2009

Try this: 

find /home/user/ -type f | xargs sed -i  's/a\.example\.com/b.example.com/g'

In case you want to ignore dot directories 

find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -type f | xargs sed -i 's/a\.example\.com/b.example.com/g'

Edit: escaped dots in search expression

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