Howto use find and sed to make a replace in multiple files

With the sed command and find command you can replace all instances of a word or multiple words in multiple files

Examples

• To replace "oldWord" with "newWord" in all the files *.c :

find . -name "*.c" -exec sed -i "s/oldWord/newWord/g" '{}' \;

• To replace multiple words in files :
  1. Edit a temporary file "replace.txt"
  2. Add the words you want to replace on a column
  3. Add the replacement words in the second column
     • For example

       word1 replacement1

       word2 replacement2

  4. To do the task, replace all the words from the first column with the equivalent from the second column in all the files *.c, Execute :

counter=0;for f in `cat replace.txt`;do replace[counter]=$f;counter=$counter+1;done;counter2=0;
for ((a=0; a <= $counter-1; a=a+2)); do `sed -i "s/${replace[$a]}/${replace[$a+1]}/g" *.c` ;done;