I have been using this command for a long time now. Whenever i am in need of this command, i won’t be remembering the correct syntax. So, i google it each time.
Now, i am gonna write it down here.
sed is a marvelous utility. Unfortunately, most people never learn its real power. The language is very simple, but the documentation is terrible
If you have to replace a string in a file, you can use:
sed -i 's/search/replace/g' filename.txt The above command (sed) edits the file (filename.txt) in place (-i) and replaces the word “search” with “replace”.
If you want to replace a string in a file and write the output to a new file then it would be like:
sed 's/search/replace/g' filename.txt > newfile.txt Now, imagine if you have a whole lot of files in a directory and you want to search for a string in all those files and replace it with another.
Lets combine the sed with the find command to do what we need.
find /look_here -type f -exec sed -i 's/search/replace/g' {} \; If you want to know more about sed and its capabilities, see here.
🙂