Shell Script to Recursively Search and Replace



Search and Replace


A colleague of mine new to Linux needed a script to recursively search a directory containing web pages, in various formats, for a specific string and replace it with another. The string was in fact part of an <img HTML tag and as such contained a partial directory structure. Most of the scripts I found when I googled for the solution didn't meet exactly what was needed so I wrote a script myself.

This script will search all "normal" files for a given string and replace with another given string. Please send any comments, corrections or improvements to daniel.mccarthy@linuxphile.org

#!/bin/bash
 #	This script will search and replace all regular files for a string 
 #	supplied by the user and replace it with another string. 
 #	
 #	Written by Daniel McCarthy
 #	daniel.mccarthy@linuxphile.org
 #
 function usage {
   echo ""
   echo "Search/replace script"
   echo "    Written by Daniel McCarthy"
   echo "      daniel.mccarthy@linuxphile.org"
   echo "      http://linuxphile.org"
   echo ""
   echo "Not enough parameters provided."
   echo "Usage: ./$0 searchstring replacestring"
   echo "Remember to escape any special characters in the searchstring or the replacestring"
   echo ""
 }
 
 #check for required parameters
 if  [ ${#1} -gt 0  ]  &&  [ ${#2} -gt 0  ];
 then
 for f in `find  -type f`;
 do
  if grep -q $1 $f;
  then
   cp $f $f.bak
   echo "The string $1 will be replaced with $2 in $f"
   sed s/$1/$2/g < $f.bak > $f
   rm $f.bak
  fi
 done
 
 else
 #print usage informamtion 
 usage
fi
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