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

There will be numerous occasions when we will 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. Using the shell for this is one of the quickest methods out there.

How to do it...

From what we have learnt up to now, we can first use find to locate the files we want to perform the text replacement on. Then, we can use sed to do the actual replacement.

Let's say we want to replace the text Copyright with the word Copyleft in all .cpp files:

$ 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 all the files of .cpp, and use print0 to print a null-separated list of files (recall that this helps, if the filenames have spaces in them). We then pipe this list to xargs, which will pass these files to sed, which in turn will make the modifications...