Using sed to replace text from a list of files from find

Question

Given the following find command: find . | xargs grep 'userTools' -sl

How can I use sed on the results of that command?

output:

./file1.ext
./file2.ext
./file3.ext

Answer 1

I am assuming that you want to perform some sed operation on the contents of each of the files rather than on the list of file names since you seem to know how to do that already. The answer depends in part on the version of sed you have available. If it supports the -i option (edit files in place), you could use xargs again like this:

find . | xargs grep 'userTools' -sl | xargs -L1 sed -i 's/this/that/g'

If your sed doesn't have the -i option, you could do this instead:

find . | xargs grep 'userTools' -sl | while read file
do
sed 's/this/that/g' "$file" > tmpfile
mv tmpfile "$file"
done

Answer 2

find . -print0 | xargs -0 grep -slZ 'userTools' | xargs -0 sed -i 's/foo/bar/'

or

find . -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '/userTools/ s/foo/bar/'

or

ack -l --print0 'userTools' | xargs -0 sed -i 's/foo/bar/'

Answer 3

find \Path_where_files_are -type f -name 'file_type' -exec  sed -e 's/"text_to_be_changed"/"text_to_be_changed_to"/' {} +