I'm wondering if there is a way to change a specific word in all of the files within the /www/ directory using command line. Just looking for a faster way to change out a specific word so I don't need to open all the files manually! Thanks!
find /www -type f -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' \{\} \;
This line will replace foo with bar every time foo occurs in any file in /www. Be very sure you know what's under /www and what the replacement would do to those files before running it.
You might be looking for a grep-sed solution to find and replace, if you are on a Mac (and referring to the Mac's Terminal app).
Related
Could you please help me with find syntax. I'm trying to replicate the effect of this command, which opens all files in each of the specified subdirectories:
open mockups/dashboard/* mockups/widget/singleproduct/* mockups/widget/carousel/*
I'd like to make it work for any set of subdirectories below mockups.
I can show all subdirectories with:
find mockups -type d -print
But I'm not sure how to use xargs to add in the "*". Also, I don't want to separately execute open for each file with "-exec open {} \;", because that launches 50 different copies of Preview, when what I need is one instance of Preview with the 50 files loaded into it.
Thanks!
The version of find I have at hand allows to specify a + sign after the -exec argument:
From the man page:
-exec command {} +
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the
selected files, but the command line is built by appending each
selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of
the command will be much less than the number of matched files.
The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds
its command lines. Only one instance of `{}' is allowed within
the command. The command is executed in the starting directory.
That means that as few instances of open will be executed as possible, e.g.:
find mockups -type f -exec open {} +
I have been trying to do a recursive grep command on files in sub folders using grep in NTemacs and Cygwin. So far the "best" results have been using grep in eshell. When I use this:
grep "t" -r *
I get a list of all file names containing the letter t, in all sub folders one layer down but notthing else. In Cygwin i get nothing. I'm working on a directroy that is not in the Cygwin install. Don't know if that mather or not.
What I want is to match the content of a more complex string in all files (and not just the file names, but the content). And in all sub directories.
I would like to use eshell from emacs but I'm open to suggestions, apart form using LINUX. This is a work PC and I don't want to do all the setup of a LINUX install.
i just wrote a very similar answer to another question, but i suspect it's the same root problem:
my first thought is that your files have windows line endings (CRLF) as opposed to unix/linux line endings (LF), and that is messing with grep's ability to parse the file. try running this:
dos2unix filename
on each file you need to search then try your grep statement again.
if you need to convert many files across several directories, i suggest using dos2unix with the -exec action of find:
find . -exec dos2unix {} \;
(add whatever other options you need to find before running that, of course)
How do I find and replace every occurrence of:
foo
with
bar
in every text file under the /my/test/dir/ directory tree (recursive find/replace).
BUT I want to be able to do it safely within an SVN checkout and not touch anything inside the .svn directories
Similar to this but now with the SVN restriction: Awk/Sed: How to do a recursive find/replace of a string?
There are several possiblities:
Using find:
Using find to create a list of all files, and then piping them to sed or the equivalent, as suggested in the answer you reference, is fairly straightforward, and only requires scanning through the files once.
You'd use one of the same answers as from the question you referenced, but adding -path '*/.svn' -prune -o after the find . in order to prune out the SVN directories. See this question for a discussion of using the prune option with find -- although note that they've got the pattern wrong. Thus, to print out all the files, you would use:
find . -path '*/.svn' -prune -o -type f -print
Then, you can pipe that into an xargs call or whatever to do the individual replacements, as suggested in the question you referenced. There is a lot of discussion there about different options, which I won't reproduce here, although I prefer the version from John Zwinck's answer:
find . -path '*/.svn' -prune -o -type f -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
Using recursive grep:
If you have a system with GNU grep, you can use that to find the list of files as well. This is probably less efficient than find, but it does allow you to only call sed on the files that match, and I personally find the syntax a lot easier to remember (or figure out from manpages):
sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' `grep -l -R --exclude-dir='*/.svn' 'foo' .`
The -l option causes grep to only output the list of file names, rather than the matching lines.
Using a GUI editor:
Alternately, if you're using windows, do what I do -- get a copy of the NoteTab editor (available in a free version), and use its search-and-replace-on-disk command, which ignores hidden .svn directories automatically and just works.
Edit: Corrected find pattern to */.svn instead of .svn, added more details and some other possibilities. However, this depends on your platform and svn version: .svn without */ may be required in some cases, like on CentOS 7.
How about this?
grep -i "search_string" `find "*.some_extension"`
That is halfway solution to finding a search_string within files that have a specific extension....once you know the files that has the string, can be easily modified by piping it into sed....
I am back with a second no-brainer question, but I would like to get this straight in my head.
I have an assignment in which I am charged with providing a command to find a file named test in my home directory (one command using find, and one using grep). I understand that using find is just 'find ~/test', but using grep, wouldn't I have to search out a pattern within the file 'test'? Or is there a way to search for the file (using grep), even if the file is empty?
ls ~ | grep test
I understand that using find is just 'find ~/test'
No. find ~/test will also have a match for every file or directory under the directory $HOME/test/. Rather use find ~ -type f -name test.
The assignment sounds unclear. But yes, if you give any filenames to grep, it will look at the contents of the files and ignore the names of the files. Perhaps you can grep the output of another command? Maybe ls as #Reese suggested, or maybe a different find command.
ls -R ~ | grep test
Explanation: ls -R ~ will recursively list all files and directories in your home folder. grep test will narrow down that list to files (and directories) that have "test" in their name.
I'm trying to run the following command in Windows Server 2003 but sed creates a pile of files that I can't delete from the command line inside the current directory.
for /R %f in (*.*) do "C:\Program Files\gnuwin32\bin\sed.exe" -i "s/bad/good/g" "%f"
Does anyone have any suggestions? Mysteriously enough, I'm able to delete the files using Windows Explorer.
As requested, here are some example filenames:
sed0E3WZJ
sed5miXwt
sed6fzFKh
And, more troubleshooting info...
It occurs from both the command prompt & batch files
If I just need to run sed on a single directory, then I use sed "s/bad/good/g" *.* and everything is OK. Alas, I also need it to tackle all the subdirectories.
I only have Sed installed.
Sed is creating the files
I have replicated your setup and I have the following observations.
I dont think there is a problem in the loop. The simple command "C:\Program Files\gnuwin32\bin\sed.exe" -i "s/bad/good/g" . - creates the same set of temporary files.
The files are indeed created by sed. sed creates these temporary files when the "in place" (-i) option is turned on. In the normal course, sed actually deletes the files (that is what happens in cygwin) using a call to the 'unlink' library. In case of gnuwin32, it looks like the 'unlink' fails. I have not been able to figure out why. I took a guess that maybe the unlink call is dependent on the gnuwin32 'coreutils' library and tried to download and install the coreutils library - no dice.
If you remove the 'read-only' restriction in the parent folder before executing the sed command, you can delete the temporary files from windows command prompt. So that should give you some temporary respite.
I think we now have enough information to raise a bug report. If you agree, I think it may be a good idea to bring it to the notice of the good folks responsible for gnuwin32 and ask them for help.
Meanwhile, the following version cleans up its temporary file:
https://github.com/mbuilov/sed-windows
As this is a known bug in sed with the -i option you can run attrib -R <filename> to remove the read only attribute from file after sed completes.
Alternatively do not use the -i option and redirect the output to a new file and then delete and rename the input and output.
Cygwin hoses the ACLs on files sometimes, you'll probably have to use cacls or chmod to fix it up before you can delete the file.
Here is where a bit of troubleshooting comes into play. Does this happen when you run that command from the command-line and a batch file? What if you run sed on an individual file on the command line - does it create these files for every file, or just certain files/filetypes? Does it only happen for that replacement, or all replacements in general, or just always when you run sed.exe on a file? Is it only sed creating these files, or all Gnuwin32 exe's (eg. awk, cat, etc)? Does the same thing happen on a sed.exe from a new install of Gnuwin32? What error message does it give when you try to delete the files? Can you delete the files from explorer while the command prompt is still open? What if you close the command prompt and reopen it, then try to delete the files?
you can just run sed without for loop
c:\test> sed -i.bak "s/bad/good/g" file*.*
This is a stab in the dark, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the gnuwin32 implementation of sed is duff (i.e., faulty in some way). Can you try to replicate the problem using the AT&T U/Win POSIX support for windows? It is easy to install and includes the Korn shell, sed, and find, so you can use find instead of the FOR /R. (I'm wondering if part of the problem is that the MS FOR and gnuwin32 sed don't play nicely together.)
I realize this is an old thread but It's still an issue. My fix is to add
"DEL sed*" to the end of a batch file after sed. Quick and dirty.
I am using this command to clean up the temporary files created by gnuwin32's sed:
FOR /f "tokens=*" %%a in ('dir /b ^| findstr /i "^sed[0-9a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z]$"') DO del %%a
i know this is old. But just want to share with people what I did that cause this.
It was in fact the temp file for an already open file through gvim example .swap file that causing the sed tmp file didnt get remove completely.
So sed trying to read and append into the opened file which the user is currently viewing and having trouble doing it which causes the tmp file error.