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I have a list of files with strings like {{abc-exfs-value}}. The sub string abc differs in each of the file. For example, a regex search (java) like: \{\{*-exfs-value\}\} will return all the strings that is of concern here. How to proceed on replacing all those strings that match the regex pattern in files in linux?

I am able to get the list of files using grep -R '\-exfs\-value' .. Using sed how to replace the strings?

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  • What do you want to replace it with? Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 17:28
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    Have you tried anything already? This sounds like a simple sed 's/pattern/replacement/'. Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 17:32
  • {{abc-exfs-value}} with {{xyz-exfs-value}}. The many variations in abc with a 'xyz'. Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 17:32
  • The "abc" part, is that only letters? Are there numbers? Are there other symbols? Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 17:36
  • Use sed 's/\({{\)[^-]*\(-.*}}\)/\1xyz\2/' Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 17:38

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I would think this is what's needed:

sed -i.bak 's/\({{\)[[:alnum:]]\+\(-exfs-value}}\)/\1xyz\2/g' file1 file2 ...
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3 Comments

sed must be old school, forces you to escape metachars?
Indeed: gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/…
@sln sed by default uses BRE hence the need for escaping meta-characters. Depending on the version of your sed you can enable ERE by doing -E (BSD) or -r (GNU). There is another variant of sed called super-sed or ssed which supports PCRE if you enable -R option.

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