Replacing a pattern with text in all the files in a directory

We often need to replace a particular text with a new text in every file in a directory. An example would be changing a common URI everywhere in a website's source directory.

How to do it...

We can use find to locate the files to have text modified. We can use sed to do the actual replacement.

To replace the Copyright text with the Copyleft word in all .cpp files, use the following command:

    find . -name *.cpp -print0 | \
        xargs -I{} -0 sed -i 's/Copyright/Copyleft/g' {}

How it works...

We use find on the current directory (.) to find the files with a .cpp suffix. The find command uses -print0 to print a null separated list of files (use -print0 when filenames have spaces in them). We pipe the list to xargs, which will pass the filenames to sed, which makes the modifications.

There's more...

If you recall, find has an -exec option, which can be used to run a command on each of the files that match the search criteria. We can...