Project-wide search/replace

search-replace.md

The basic form is:

ack --type=js -f app/views/ | xargs sed -i '' -e 's/search/replace/'

I use ack to generate list of files on which I want to perform the search/replace, and then sed does the actual work. It helps to run this on a clean working directory so I can use git diff to examine the results and git checkout -- . to undo everything and try again if I screw everything up.

Here is another way I've been doing this lately:

grep -R -l pattern search_dir | xargs sed -i '' -e 's/search/replace/'

Lately I've starting playing around with vim's :bufdo command to run a command on every file. It's a little easier to remember than the xargs/sed combination, and bufdo let's you use vim macros, which are often more intuitive than regular expressions.

vim $(grep -R -l pattern)
# ...now in vim
:bufdo %s/search/replace/ge | update
:q

See more info on bufdo/argdo commands.