search and replace string on multiple files from unix terminal

Question

We are converting all the static html pages in our codebase into php pages. The first step would be to change all the .html file extension to .php (which I already did). The second step would be to update all the links within each of those html pages to point to new php pages.

(for instance, inside index.php i have links to both contact.html and about-us.html. Now since we have replaced every .html file extension to .php, we need to change contact.html to contact.php, and likewise, about-us.html to about-us.php).

what i want to do now is to search for a particular string across multiple files. (search for "contact.html" inside many files, such as index.php, index2.php, index3.php, etc etc..) after that, replace all "contact.html" in all those files with "contact.php".

I am not familiar with unix command line, and i so far have seen other people's similar questions here in the forum but not quite understand which one could help me achieve what i want. I'm using cygwin and if possible i need to solve this without perl script since i dont have it installed. i need to try using either sed, grep, find, or anything else.

So, if any of you think that this is a duplicate please point me to a relevant post out there. thanks for your time.

Adam Liss · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-24 00:26:42Z

37

Try this:

find . -name '*.html' -exec sed -i 's/\.html/\.php/g' "{}" \;

It will find all files in the current and subdirectories that end in .html, and run sed on each of them to replace .html with .php anywhere it appears within them.

See http://content.hccfl.edu/pollock/unix/findcmd.htm for more details.

answered Sep 24, 2011 at 0:26

Adam Liss

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2 Comments

Jonathan Leffler Over a year ago

This works with GNU sed; it won't necessarily work on other Unix platforms because of the non-standard -i option to sed.

Adam Liss Over a year ago

@JonathanLeffler: Yes, how spoiled we become. :-)

j0k · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-10 19:24:33Z

15

On my Mac, I had to add a parameter to the -i option: the extension to add to the name (in this case, nothing, so the file is stored in-place).

find . -name '*.html' -exec sed -i '' 's/\.html/\.php/g' "{}" \;

edited Oct 10, 2012 at 19:24

j0k

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answered Jul 12, 2012 at 4:14

Fabruccio

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Comments

user649198 · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-19 22:30:17Z

1

You can certainly use ack to select your files to update. For example,
to change all "foo" to "bar" in all PHP files, you can do this from 
the Unix shell: 

perl -i -p -e's/foo/bar/g' $(ack -f --php)

Source: man ack

answered Nov 19, 2013 at 22:30

user649198

1 Comment

Nathan Stocks Over a year ago

This solution preserved end-of-file newlines on OS X, where sed would remove them. (I had to brew install ack though)

alex · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-15 16:53:43Z

0

This worked for me :

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/str1/str2/g'

edited Jul 15, 2014 at 16:53

answered Jun 23, 2014 at 22:17

alex

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Vishnu · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-13 11:10:02Z

0

This should work (found here: http://www.mehtanirav.com/search-and-replace-recursively-using-sed-and-grep/):

for i in `find . -type f` ; do sed "s/html/php/g" "$i" >> "$i.xx"; mv "$i.xx" "$i"; done

edited Jul 13, 2015 at 11:10

Vishnu

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answered Sep 24, 2011 at 0:15

jschorr

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Comments

pes502 · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-22 12:03:36Z

0

Below script can help in replacing the string in files:

#!/bin/bash
echo -e "please specify the folder where string has need to be replaced: \c"
read a
echo -e "please specify the string to be replaced: \c"
read b
echo -e "please specify the string: \c"
read c
find $a -type f -exec sed -i 's/'"$b"'/'"$c"'/g' {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
echo "string has been replaced..."
else                                                                         echo "String replacement has been failed"
exit0
fi

edited Jun 22, 2016 at 12:03

pes502

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answered Jun 22, 2016 at 10:32

Nishanth

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