How to find and replace from the command line

Once in a while, I find myself needing to replace a string in multiple files. There's no build in functionality in Neovim to do this but you can use the command line. Every time I search how to do it though I come across the above stackoverflow thread and spend half an hour working out how to do it.

The following command will do the job on OSX:

LC_ALL=C find ./ -type f -exec sed -i '' -e & '/find text/replace text/' {} \;

• LC_ALL=C is used to ensure consistent behavior across different locales.
• find ./ -type f Finds all files (-type f ) in the current directory (./) and its subdirectories. This could be modified to search only in a specific directory e.g. find ./src -type f
• -exec sed -i '' -e 's/replace text/replace text/' {} \;This is where the magic happens. It uses the results of the find command to replace the replace text with the replace text.

Possible Issues and Fixes

If replace text or replace text contains slashes (/), use a different delimiter like |:

LC_ALL=C find ./ -type f -exec sed -i '' -e & 's|find/text|replace/text|' {} \;

If modifying a large number of files, consider using xargs to avoid spawning a new sed process for each file:

LC_ALL=C find ./ -type f -exec grep -Iq . {} ; -print | xargs sed -i '' -e '/find text/replace text/' {} \;

The grep command is used to filter out binary files, because we're writing code, and we have binary files in our project...

Hopefully I never need to visit that stackoverflow thread again...