Use sed to find and replace a string in multiple files

Question

I'm trying to pass a list of files with a known set of characters to sed for a find and replace.

For a directory containing multiple .xml files:

ls -la

file1.xml
file2.xml
file3.xml

Each containing a matching string:

grep -i foo *

file1.xml <foo/>
file2.xml <foo/>
file3.xml <foo/>

Replace foo with bar using a for loop:

for f in *.xml; do ls | sed -i "s|foo|bar|g" ; done

Returns:

sed: no input files
sed: no input files
sed: no input files

I already figured out an alternative that works, so this is mostly for my own edification at this point.

find /dir/ -name '*.xml' -exec sed -i "s|foo|bar|g" {} \;

Solution

You have a flaw in your for loop. Remove the ls command, and add the $f variable as the argument to sed -i, which will edit each filename.xml in place:

for f in *.xml; do sed -i "s|foo|bar|g" "$f"; done

Comments

[Bert]

Bingo. This is what I was aiming for.