While a multitude of methods exist to search for and replace words in a single file, what do you do when you’ve got a string to update across multiple unrelated files, all with different names? You harness the power of command line tools, of course!
First, you’ll need to find
all the files you want to change. Stringing together what are effectively search queries for find
is really only limited by your imagination. Here’s a simple example that finds Python files:
find . -name '*.py'
The -name
test searches for a pattern, such as all files ending in .py
, but find
can do a lot more with other test conditions, including -regex
tests. Run find --help
to see the multitude of options.
Further tune your search by using grep
to get only the files that contain the string you want to change, such as by adding:
grep -le '\<a whale\>'
The -l
option gives you just the file names for all files containing a pattern (denoted with -e
) that match “a whale”.
Using Vim’s impressive :bufdo
lets you run the same command across multiple buffers, interactively working with all of these files without the tedium of opening, saving, and closing each file, one at a time.
Let’s plug your powerful find
+grep
results into Vim with:
vim `find . -name '*.py' \
-exec grep -le '\<a whale\>' {} \;`
Using backtick-expansion to pass our search to Vim opens up multiple buffers ready to go. (Do :h backtick-expansion
in Vim for more.) Now you can apply the Vim command :bufdo
to all of these files and perform actions such as interactive search-and-replace:
:bufdo %s/a whale/a bowl of petunias/gce
The g
for “global” will change occurrences of the pattern on all lines. The e
will omit errors if the pattern is not found. The c
option makes this interactive; if you’re feeling confident, you can omit it to make the changes without reviewing each one.
When you’ve finished going through all the buffers, save all the work you’ve completed with:
:bufdo wq!
Then bask in the glory of your saved time and effort.
Top comments (3)
I wrote a command-line tool with this purpose I think you would enjoy.
It's called ruplacer and here's how it works:
You should take a look at sd: github.com/chmln/sd
It's written in Rust with a fairly simple API. But especially: it's performant!