- How can I do a recursive find and replace from the command line?
- 10 Answers 10
- Linux Find Recursive
- Using Find
- Using fd Command
- find file linux recursive
- How do I find a file in Linux terminal recursively?
- How do I find files recursively?
- How do I find a file recursively in Unix?
- What is a recursive file search?
- How do I find a file in Linux terminal?
- How do I use grep to find a file in Linux?
- Which command will find all the files without permission 777?
- How do I find a file without knowing the path in Unix?
- Is grep recursive by default?
- How do I see all files in Linux?
- How do I grep all files in a directory?
- How do I find subfolders in Linux?
- How to Search for Files Recursively into Subdirectories
- 5 Answers 5
- bash
- Perl
- Python
- find
How can I do a recursive find and replace from the command line?
Using a shell like bash or zshell, how can I do a recursive ‘find and replace’? In other words, I want to replace every occurrence of ‘foo’ with ‘bar’ in all files in this directory and its subdirectories.
It might be a good idea to try this in vim. That way you can use the confirmation feature to make sure you don’t swap something you don’t intend to. I am not sure if it can be done directory wide.
10 Answers 10
This command will do it (tested on both Mac OS X Lion and Kubuntu Linux).
# Recursively find and replace in files find . -type f -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/foo/bar/g'
- find . -type f -name ‘*.txt’ finds, in the current directory ( . ) and below, all regular files ( -type f ) whose names end in .txt
- | passes the output of that command (a list of filenames) to the next command
- xargs gathers up those filenames and hands them one by one to sed
- sed -i » -e ‘s/foo/bar/g’ means «edit the file in place, without a backup, and make the following substitution ( s/foo/bar ) multiple times per line ( /g )» (see man sed )
Note that the ‘without a backup’ part in line 4 is OK for me, because the files I’m changing are under version control anyway, so I can easily undo if there was a mistake.
To avoid having to remember this, I use an interactive bash script, as follows:
#!/bin/bash # find_and_replace.sh echo "Find and replace in current directory!" echo "File pattern to look for? (eg '*.txt')" read filepattern echo "Existing string?" read existing echo "Replacement string?" read replacement echo "Replacing all occurences of $existing with $replacement in files matching $filepattern" find . -type f -name $filepattern -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e "s/$existing/$replacement/g"
Linux Find Recursive
Recursive directory listing allows you to view and find files that are nested inside other subdirectories.
One of the commands that are built for that purpose is the tree command. A tree is a simple and powerful directory listing utility. You can specify the level of depth that you wish to show in a single command.
Tree, as the name suggests, allows you to show files in nested directories in a tree-like format. It also gives you details about the specified path, including the total number of files and directories, etc.
To install it, use your system package manager:
You can then use the tree command followed by the path to the target directory.
For example, the command below shows all the files and directories inside the /var/logs directory:
To find all the files and directories, including hidden files, you can use the -a flag with the tree command:
Using Find
You can also use the find command followed by the target directory and the file you wish to locate.
For example, to locate the file access.logs in the root directory, use the command:
The command will start in the root directory and recursively search all the subdirectories and locate any file with the specified name.
To find any files ending with a specific extension, run the command:
The command will start in the current working directory as specified by the period and recursively search for all files ending with the .txt extension.
Using fd Command
The fd command is a free, open-source utility that is developed as an alternative to the find command.
It is very fast and user-friendly and has incredible functionality. It’s a great tool when you need to locate a file that is nested inside a series of subdirectories.
To install it, run the commands:
find file linux recursive
How do I find a file in Linux terminal recursively?
find is a command for recursively filtering objects in the file system based on a simple conditional mechanism. Use find to search for a file or directory on your file system. Using the -exec flag, files can be found and immediately processed within the same command.
How do I find files recursively?
- Solution: find + grep. For years I always used variations of the following Linux find and grep commands to recursively search subdirectories for files that match a grep pattern: find . — .
- Solution: `grep -r` .
- Search multiple subdirectories. .
- Using egrep recursively. .
- Summary: `grep -r` notes.
How do I find a file recursively in Unix?
grep command: Recursively Search All Files For A String
To ignore case distinctions: grep -ri «word» . To display print only the filenames with GNU grep, enter: grep -r -l «foo» .
What is a recursive file search?
Alternatively referred to as recursive, recurse is a term used to describe the procedure capable of being repeated. For example, when listing files in a Windows command prompt, you can use the dir /s command to recursively list all files in the current directory and any subdirectories.
How do I find a file in Linux terminal?
- Open your favorite terminal app. .
- Type the following command: find /path/to/folder/ -iname *file_name_portion* .
- If you need to find only files or only folders, add the option -type f for files or -type d for directories.
How do I use grep to find a file in Linux?
The grep command searches through the file, looking for matches to the pattern specified. To use it type grep , then the pattern we’re searching for and finally the name of the file (or files) we’re searching in. The output is the three lines in the file that contain the letters ‘not’.
Which command will find all the files without permission 777?
find /home/ -perm 777 -type f
This command will list all the files inside the home directory that has 777 permissions.
How do I find a file without knowing the path in Unix?
- -name file-name – Search for given file-name. .
- -iname file-name – Like -name, but the match is case insensitive. .
- -user userName – The file’s owner is userName.
Is grep recursive by default?
For instance, it’s recursive by default and automatically ignores files and directories listed in . gitignore , so you don’t have to keep passing the same cumbersome exclude options to grep or find. but grep -r is a better answer. Recurse in directories only searching file matching PATTERN .
How do I see all files in Linux?
- find . — name thisfile.txt. If you need to know how to find a file in Linux called thisfile. .
- find /home -name *.jpg. Look for all . jpg files in the /home and directories below it.
- find . — type f -empty. Look for an empty file inside the current directory.
- find /home -user randomperson-mtime 6 -iname «.db»
How do I grep all files in a directory?
To grep All Files in a Directory Recursively, we need to use -R option. When -R options is used, The Linux grep command will search given string in the specified directory and subdirectories inside that directory. If no folder name is given, grep command will search the string inside the current working directory.
How do I find subfolders in Linux?
3 Answers. Try find /dir -type d -name «your_dir_name» . Replace /dir with your directory name, and replace «your_dir_name» with the name you’re looking for. -type d will tell find to search for directories only.
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How to Search for Files Recursively into Subdirectories
I am trying to look for all XML files in a particular directory and all sub-directories (recursively) inside it. ls -R *.xml is only listing files in the current directory. I am quite sure, the sub-folders themselves have several .xml files, but none are showing up. Is this a configuration issue?
5 Answers 5
. is the current directory. If you need to search in another directory, replace . with the directory path.
Does it search for the required file recursively in the directory rooted at current directory. In my case it just checked in the current directory only, didn’t check the subdirectory.
Actually I searched for .php files in current directory. But it returned only .php files in current directory, didn’t searched recursively in sub-directories. That’s why I’m asking whether find command searches recursively or not.
@mostafiz, the find command searches recursively. If you don’t quote the parameter, I think your shell might do an expansion on the * , so it will match the files in the current directory.
sudo find . -print | grep -i '.*[.]xml'
-1 for mixing find and grep , when find can do filtering using both regexes and globs, and not using find ‘s -print0 and grep’s -z when you do need to mix.
ls doesn’t have options to filter the output. For that you would need to use pipe. This passes the output from ls to grep , which then filters them to show just the .xml files.
bash
Using globstar shell option, we can make use of recursive globbing ./**/*
bash-4.3$ shopt -s globstar bash-4.3$ for i in ./**/*.xml; do printf "%s\n" "$i" ; done ./adwaita-timed.xml ./bin/hw5/stuff/book/chapter42servletexample/build/web/META-INF/context.xml ./bin/hw5/stuff/book/chapter42servletexample/build/web/WEB-INF/beans.xml ./bin/hw5/stuff/book/chapter42servletexample/build/web/WEB-INF/web.xml
Perl
Perl has a module Find , which allows for recursive directory tree traversal. Within the special find() function, we can define a wanted subroutine and the directory that we want to traverse, in this example that’s . . The one-liner in such case would be:
bash-4.3$ perl -le 'use File::Find; find(sub,".")' ./adwaita-timed.xml ./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/jsf2demo/build/web/WEB-INF/beans.xml ./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/jsf2demo/build/web/WEB-INF/web.xml ./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/liangweb/build.xml
Python
While Perl has a whole module dedicated to recursive tree traversal, Python has a neat function walk() that is part of os module, and repeatedly returns tuple of topmost path, list of all subdirectories, and list of filenames. We can do the following:
bash-4.3$ python -c 'import os,sys; [ sys.stdout.write(os.path.join(r,i)+"\n") for r,s,f in os.walk(".") for i in f if i.endswith(".xml") ]' ./adwaita-timed.xml ./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/jsf2demo/build/web/WEB-INF/beans.xml ./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/jsf2demo/build/web/WEB-INF/web.xml ./CLEAR_DESKTOP/blahblah/hw5/stuff/book/liangweb/build.xml
This might be far neater as a script:
#!/usr/bin/env python import os,sys for r,s,f in os.walk("."): for i in f: if i.endswith(".xml") print(os.path.join(r,i))
find
Other answers have mentioned find for recursive traversal, and that’s the go-to tool for the job. What does need mention is the fact that find has multiple command line switches, such as -printf to print output in desired format, -type f to find only regular files, -inum to search by inode number, -mtime to search by modification date, -exec <> \; to execute a particular command to process the file with passing file as argument ( where <> is standard find placeholder for current file) , and many others so please read the manpage for find .