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Is there a way to grep for a regular expression on an Ubuntu server and then find and replace it with another string? I am using the following command right now, but it doesn't account for actually changing the grepped string: 

grep --recursive --ignore-case “string”

If I use awk or sed how would I write it to replace for instance "wavbyte" with "gitship" for all instances where "wavbyte" occurs for my entire server?

roaima
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Cody Rutscher
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    You want sed, not grep. Also, you're using "smart" quotes, so grep will search for the literal string `“string”`, including the quotes. You want `"string"` (or probably even better, `'string'`, unless you plan on using parameter expansion in the search term). – Benjamin W. Oct 01 '18 at 00:51
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    `grep` isn't used to replace strings. It's used for finding strings. To replace them, you need `sed` or `awk`. – Nasir Riley Oct 01 '18 at 00:52
  • So would it be something like – Cody Rutscher Oct 01 '18 at 00:54
  • sed --recursive --ignore-case "string", "replacement-string" – Cody Rutscher Oct 01 '18 at 00:54
  • Related: [search and replace using grep (not sed)](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/373420/search-and-replace-using-grep-not-sed) - however you *could* use `grep --recursive --files-with-matches` to construct a list of file names to be passed to `sed` – steeldriver Oct 01 '18 at 00:58
  • Is there not a way to do it in one command where it searches for all instances and then replaces them? – Cody Rutscher Oct 01 '18 at 00:59
  • @CodyRutscher you can do your own command by putting all that in a function or script: `sed-ri(){ e="$1"; shift; find "$@" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "$e"; }` then `sed-ri 's/foo/bar/g' files and dirs ...` –  Oct 01 '18 at 02:04
  • @Goro your edits are changing the meaning of the question again. – roaima Oct 01 '18 at 20:24
  • @roaima Thank you so much! Actually, I was on a very long chat last night with the OP (link below) and his problem was completely not relevant at all to his question. Given that I solved his problem, I rewarded the question to reflect the problem. If this is not acceptable we can rollback. Apologies! –  Oct 01 '18 at 20:27
  • @Goro I've already rolled back. Part of the problem, I think, is that you don't use the summary field to explain why you have made an edit. In this case if you had added a summary such as, "After long chat OP actually wants a different question; editing to new requirement" or something then it would have been more obvious that you were intentionally changing the meaning. – roaima Oct 01 '18 at 20:31
  • @roaima . Thank you for the note! You are completely correct! Indeed, I neglected adding summary about the objective of the changes.... I will definitely take this into account in the future! Your feedback is appreciated thanks ;-) –  Oct 01 '18 at 20:35

1 Answers1

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Try this command

grep -rl "wavbyte" somedir/ | xargs sed -i 's/wavbyte/gitship/g'

You can try find and sed

find /some_path -type f -exec sed -i 's/oldstring/newstring/g' {} \;