Find and replace with sed in directory and sub directories

Question

Your find should look like that to avoid sending directory names to sed:

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/apple/orange/g' {} \;

For larger s&r tasks it's better and faster to use grep and xargs, so, for example;

grep -rl 'apples' /dir_to_search_under | xargs sed -i 's/apples/oranges/g'

Since there are also macOS folks reading this one (as I did), the following code worked for me (on 10.14)

egrep -rl '<pattern>' <dir> | xargs -I@ sed -i '' 's/<arg1>/<arg2>/g' @

All other answers using -i and -e do not work on macOS.

Source

This worked for me:

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i '' 's#NEEDLE#REPLACEMENT#' *.php {} \;