What is the best way to find & replace in a directory and all sub-directories

mostanser · 04-01-2009, 12:43 AM

Hi folks
please let me know what is the best way to find & replace in a directory and all sub-directories?

can I use sed for this?

maxy7710 · 04-01-2009, 01:56 AM

U want to find & replace directories & all its sub folders then use

find / -name 'directory-name'

this command will look for u r directory from " / "

mostanser · 04-02-2009, 01:01 AM

hi
thanks for your help, but I just dont want to search strings in a files of a directory set rather I wanted to replace string. That is, search and replace.

is there any recursive idea with this??
I run this command:
find *.* -name .svn -prune -o -exec sed -i 's/google.com/yahoo.com/g' {} \;

it worked, but this is not a recursive process, please help...

chrism01 · 04-02-2009, 05:26 AM

From the man page for 'find'

Quote:

-prune If -depth is not given, true; if the file is a directory, do not
descend into it.
If -depth is given, false; no effect.

so in your case it won't descend. Also, using '*.*' as the start point in find is probably wrong.
You're supposed to give the dir to start from ie the top of the dir tree you want to search. Usually it'll be one of :

. - current dir
/ - all dirs in system (prob not what you want)
/some/dir/path - specific other dir, ie not current dir

mostanser · 04-06-2009, 10:31 PM

Code:

find *.* -name .svn -prune -o -exec sed -i 's/google.com/yahoo.com/g' {} \;

but this line worked for me with *.* and . not worked but I did not tried wusing placing any directory name. May be you right, but suddenly mine one worked..

Many thanks for your reply.