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Searching Through Files - Finding A Particular String And Updating It

Main command: grep -rnw "xA" -e "xB" | xargs sed -i 's/xC/xD/'

  • grep – Obvious, search to find results.
  • -rnw – Search all directories after string definition.
  • “xA” – Location to search.
  • “xB” – String to search. Has to be in quotations!
  • | - Pipe, put results from grep into sed.
  • xargs – Call on argument from result.
  • sed – Replace.
  • 's/xC/xD/' – Replace string xC with xD.

If you see on the example below, you would use the grep command up to the pipe symbol first without -l, then add it in afterwards. This is used after searching for strings. The letter L is for grep’ing just the directory location where it finds the result and not actually showing file contents.

SED WILL NOT work if you do not add -l into the -rlnw. It has to require the absolute paths and not anything else it outputs.

An Example

Searching through LuckPerms configs in all servers to replace connection timeout string.

grep -rlnw "connection-timeout: 5000" */plugins/LuckPerms | xargs sed -i 's/connection-timeout: 5000/connection-timeout: 20000/'

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