Linux: How can I edit all the files returned by find in vi?

Question

Something I find myself doing a lot is running a find command and then editing all of them in vi, which looks something like this:

> find . "*.txt"
./file1.txt
./file2.txt
./path/to/file3.txt

> vi ./file1.txt ./file2.txt ./path/to/file3.txt

Is there a clever & simple way to do this all in one command line?

Answer 1

This should do the trick:

vim $(find . -name "*.txt")

Use VIM, it's better for your health. :-)

Piping into xargs vi gives a Warning: Input is not from a terminal, plus a terminal with completely bogus behaviour afterwards. User grawity explained why in a comment below, and with a bit more explanation in this question.

Answer 2

Or run vim and from there:

:args **/*.txt

Answer 3

Additionally, if you wanted them opened one at a time, you can also use find -exec or use a simple for loop. Edited per ceving's comment.

find . -name "*.txt" -exec vi {} \;

or

OLDIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
for i in `find . -name "*.txt"`
    do
        vi $i
    done
IFS=$OLDIFS