MongoDB: How to update multiple documents with a single command?

Question

Multi update was added recently, so is only available in the development releases (1.1.3). From the shell you do a multi update by passing true as the fourth argument to update(), where the the third argument is the upsert argument:

db.test.update({foo: "bar"}, {$set: {test: "success!"}}, false, true);

For versions of mongodb 2.2+ you need to set option multi true to update multiple documents at once.

db.test.update({foo: "bar"}, {$set: {test: "success!"}}, {multi: true})

For versions of mongodb 3.2+ you can also use new method updateMany() to update multiple documents at once, without the need of separate multi option.

db.test.updateMany({foo: "bar"}, {$set: {test: "success!"}})

Starting in v3.3 You can use updateMany

db.collection.updateMany(
   <filter>,
   <update>,
   {
     upsert: <boolean>,
     writeConcern: <document>,
     collation: <document>,
     arrayFilters: [ <filterdocument1>, ... ]
   }
)

In v2.2, the update function takes the following form:

 db.collection.update(
   <query>,
   <update>,
   { upsert: <boolean>, multi: <boolean> }
)

https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/method/db.collection.update/

For Mongo version > 2.2, add a field multi and set it to true

db.Collection.update({query}, 
                 {$set: {field1: "f1", field2: "f2"}},
                 {multi: true })

I've created a way to do this with a better interface.

• db.collection.find({ ... }).update({ ... }) -- multi update
• db.collection.find({ ... }).replace({ ... }) -- single replacement
• db.collection.find({ ... }).upsert({ ... }) -- single upsert
• db.collection.find({ ... }).remove() -- multi remove

You can also apply limit, skip, sort to the updates and removes by chaining them in beforehand.

If you are interested, check out Mongo-Hacker