Search code examples
macosperldirectorymacos-sierra

Search and replace a word in directory and its subdirectories

I need to find and replace a word in all the files across a directory and its subdirectories.

I used this line of code:

perl -pi -w -e 's/foo/bar/g;' *.*

But it changes the words only in files in the current directory and doesn't affect the subdirectories.

How can I change the word on every directory and subdirectory?

Solution

  • You could do a pure Perl solution that recursively traverses your directory structure, but that'd require a lot more code to write.

    The easier solution is to use the find command which can be told to find all files and run a command against them.

    find . -type f -exec perl -pi -w -e 's/foo/bar/g;' \{\} \;

    (I've escaped the {} and ; just in case but you might not need this)