On windows, you might have been using text editors that search or search&replace within files in a folder, one such tool i have used in windows is “source edit” by Joacim Andersson (Brixoft Software). that text editor does not seem to be maintained any longer as the developer seems to have moved into making games, but there are certainly many other editors that allow you to do the same thing.
On the other hand, on Linux, I don’t need to do that, the basic tools that come with the operating system allow for that, multi gigabyte files can be searched and have certain text replaced at the speed it takes to read them (Without having to open them for editing)
So, let us assume we have a folder with many text files (Including css or js or html or php files for example), to search that folder, we can combine
grep -Ril "text-to-find-here" /path/to/file/
-R (-r) look for files recursively
-l show file names, not the contents that were found
-i ….
Another tool which is better suited for looking in code is ack (ack-grep) which i will come back to cover in this article, and a newer tool that i have never used is
Now, replacing a string inside a file is simple, there is a cool tool called sed
sed -i '/TEXTTOFIND/ s//TEXTTOREPLACEWITH/g' verylargefile.txt
Now, to find all occurances of a string in all the files in a directory and it’s subdirectories, you can use the following command, Mind you, this is always treated as a regular expression, if your string contains a dot or anything else that is part of regular expression syntax, you will need to escape it, to avoid that, check out the sd command below
find -type f -exec sed -i 's/find/replace/g' {} +
{} + invokes the “exec” command with multiple file names at once, instead of once per file
The sd command
the -s flag disables regular expressions, sd and fd have rust crates, apt install fd-find sd
fd --type file --exec sd 'Find' 'Replace'
Or with backup
fd --type file --exec cp {} {}.bk \; --exec sd 'from "react"' 'from "preact"'-s: No regular expressions
In some cases you can even forget about fd, as sd is now capable of dealing with multiple files
sd -i "\n" "," *.txt