Linux search for text in files subdirectories

#LINUX SEARCH FOR TEXT IN FILES SUBDIRECTORIES HOW TO#

For example, say you want to skip the tests/ directory: grep -RiIl -exclude-dir=tests 'search' | xargs sed 's/search/replace/g'Д®xclude multiple directories by wrapping them into curly braces, like so: grep -RiIl -exclude-dir= 'search' | xargs sed 's/search/replace/g'Д«oth grep and sed support regular expressions, so you can search with grep given a specific pattern and then replace the text with sed given another one. You can add the -exclude-dir= parameter to grep if you want to skip a specific directory while searching for files.

#LINUX SEARCH FOR TEXT IN FILES SUBDIRECTORIES HOW TO#

replace), the g instructs the command to replace all occurrences.ДЇine tuning 1: how to exclude directories while searching

s/search/replace/g - this is the substitution command.In the current snippet I'm using it to replace text with the following parameters: Sed is a glorious Unix utility that transforms text. So in this example the output of grep is passed to the next command sed as its argument. This is a little command-line utility that takes what receives in input and passes it as argument to another program. l - print results as a simple list of file names.R - perform a recursive search, also across symbolic links.Here I'm invoking it with the following parameters: Grep is a utility for searching for strings through multiple text files. Let me now dissect it and take a quick look at the different tools in use. Assuming that you want to search for the string search through multiple files and replace it with replace, this is the one-liner: grep -RiIl 'search' | xargs sed -i 's/search/replace/g'

After a bit of research I've come up with a nice solution. Often times I need to search and replace a string of text across multiple files in my Linux box.

Linux search for text in files subdirectories