linux - How to grep and replace

Another option is to use find and then pass it through sed.

find /path/to/files -type f -exec sed -i 's/oldstring/new string/g' {} \; 

I got the answer.

grep -rl matchstring somedir/ | xargs sed -i 's/string1/string2/g' 

You could even do it like this:

Example

grep -rl 'windows' ./ | xargs sed -i 's/windows/linux/g' 

This will search for the string 'windows' in all files relative to the current directory and replace 'windows' with 'linux' for each occurrence of the string in each file.

This works best for me on OS X:

grep -r -l 'searchtext' . | sort | uniq | xargs perl -e "s/matchtext/replacetext/" -pi 

Source: http://www.praj.com.au/post/23691181208/grep-replace-text-string-in-files

Usually not with grep, but rather with sed -i 's/string_to_find/another_string/g' or perl -i.bak -pe 's/string_to_find/another_string/g'.