How to change all occurrences of a word in all files in a directory

Question

I was in the process of creating a User class where one of the methods was get_privileges();.

After hours of slamming my head into the keyboard, I finally discovered that the previous coder who I inherited this particular database spelled the word "privileges" as "privelages" in the MySQL database, and thus also everywhere in the hundreds of files that access these "privelages" it is spelled that way.

Is there a way in Linux (Ubuntu Server) that I can go through every place in the /var/www folder and replace "privelages" with "privileges", so that I don't have to deal with this typo and code around it?

Answer 1

A variation that takes into account subdirectories (untested):

find /var/www -type f -exec sed -i 's/privelages/privileges/g' {} \; 

This will find all files (not directories, specified by -type f) under /var/www, and perform a sed command to replace "privelages" with "privileges" on each file it finds.