On Sunday 28 February 2010, Stroller wrote:
> > A starting point could be (after you make a backup of the whole tree)
> >
> > find /basedir -type f -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
>
> Many thanks - that looks great!
>
> My only concern is that it is unreliable enough that you state the
> need to backup first. ;)
The problem is that with such a command it's very easy to screw up hundreds or
thousands of files (depending how many you have in the directory tree) in a
non-reversible way, for example due to a slight error in the sed command.
Hence the suggestion of backing up before trying. Alternatively, you can
supply an extension to the -i option, as in -i.bak for example, to have sed
create backup copies of the changed files (which you can then remove when
you've made sure the changes have been successful).
