Find and Replace Text Within Multiple Files in Linux – Avoid RSI

After updating 100+ pages manually, I realized that I had neglected to add “index.php” to the end of certain links. Usually this would be fine, but the links in question are opened in Shadowbox, which will fail on pretty, “index.php”-less links.

I was able to fix this on the server in 5 seconds with find+perl:

find . -name 'FILE_NAME.EXTENSION' | xargs perl -pi -e 's/FIND/REPLACE/g'

Where FILE_NAME is the name of the files to be searched in (can be ‘*’) and EXTENSION is the filetype (can be ‘*’). FIND is the text to be searched, and REPLACE is a replacement string.

Phew!

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Tags: Bash, Linux, Perl, Tutorial