Grep global find replace

Question

Is there a way to grep for a regular expression on an Ubuntu server and then find and replace it with another string? I am using the following command right now, but it doesn't account for actually changing the grepped string:

grep --recursive --ignore-case “string”

If I use awk or sed how would I write it to replace for instance "wavbyte" with "gitship" for all instances where "wavbyte" occurs for my entire server?

Solution

Try this command

grep -rl "wavbyte" somedir/ | xargs sed -i 's/wavbyte/gitship/g'

You can try find and sed

find /some_path -type f -exec sed -i 's/oldstring/newstring/g' {} \;

Comments

[Cody Rutscher]

So would it be something like

[Cody Rutscher]

sed --recursive --ignore-case "string", "replacement-string"

[smw]

Related: search and replace using grep (not sed) - however you could use grep --recursive --files-with-matches to construct a list of file names to be passed to sed

[Cody Rutscher]

Is there not a way to do it in one command where it searches for all instances and then replaces them?

[mosvy]

@CodyRutscher you can do your own command by putting all that in a function or script: sed-ri(){ e="$1"; shift; find "$@" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "$e"; } then sed-ri 's/foo/bar/g' files and dirs ...

[roaima]

@Goro your edits are changing the meaning of the question again.

[Admin]

@roaima Thank you so much! Actually, I was on a very long chat last night with the OP (link below) and his problem was completely not relevant at all to his question. Given that I solved his problem, I rewarded the question to reflect the problem. If this is not acceptable we can rollback. Apologies!

[Admin]

@roaima . Thank you for the note! You are completely correct! Indeed, I neglected adding summary about the objective of the changes.... I will definitely take this into account in the future! Your feedback is appreciated thanks ;-)

[Cody Rutscher]

Do I replace "matchstring" with the new or old string and what if I want to do it from the root directory of the server?

[Cody Rutscher]

For instance if I am replacing "wavbyte" with "gitship" from the root directory of the Ubuntu server would it be:

[Cody Rutscher]

find / -type f -exec sed -i 's/wavbyte/gitship/g' {} \;

[Cody Rutscher]

Right, but wavbyte is in a lot of different places in the server. How am I going to memorize all of those locations and then go in by hand and change to gitship?

[Cody Rutscher]

Let us continue this discussion in chat.