Recursive search and replace in text files on Mac and Linux

Question

In the linux shell, the following command will recursively search and replace all instances of 'this' with 'that' (I don't have a Linux shell in front of me, but it should do).

find . -name "*.txt" -print | xargs sed -i 's/this/that/g'

What will a similar command on OSX look like?

Answer 1

OS X uses a mix of BSD and GNU tools, so best always check the documentation (although I had it that less didn't even conform to the OS X manpage):

https://web.archive.org/web/20170808213955/https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/sed.1.html

sed takes the argument after -i as the extension for backups. Provide an empty string (-i '') for no backups.

The following should do:

find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i '' s/this/that/g {} +

The -type f is just good practice; sed will complain if you give it a directory or so.

-exec is preferred over xargs; you needn't bother with -print0 or anything.

The {} + at the end means that find will append all results as arguments to one instance of the called command, instead of re-running it for each result. (One exception is when the maximal number of command-line arguments allowed by the OS is breached; in that case find will run more than one instance.)

If you get an error like "invalid byte sequence," it might help to force the standard locale by adding LC_ALL=C at the start of the command, like so:

LC_ALL=C find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed -i '' s/this/that/g {} +