sed - replace text in multiple files

[Note: This page was unpublished from Drupal.org, and so became a martyr in the battle against pretending that unpublishing is a replacement or an aid to curating content. Rescued with the help of archive.org. If you agree that we should be deprecating, pointing forward, and curating our documentation, pitch in.]

sed - replace text in multiple files

Last modified: March 16, 2007 - 21:07

sed - is useful to find and replace text in single multiple files.

* Replacing foo with foo_bar in a single file.

sed -i 's/foo/foo_bar/g' somefile.module
o -i = tell sed to edit the file(s)
o s = substitute the following text
o foo = what you want to substitute
o foo_bar = what you want to replace
o g = global, match all occurrences in the line
* Replacing foo with foo_bar in a multiple files.

sed -i 's/foo/foo_bar/g' *.module
* Now you can run cvs diff -up > yourpatchfile.patch to create a patch.

sed is available on the Win32 platform by installing GNU utilities for Win32