Question

Hopefully, this will be a quick one for someone here… I need to find and replace a string recursively in unix.

Normally, I use:

perl -e "s/term/differenterm/g;" -pi $(find path/to/DIRECTORY -type f)

But, the string I need to replace contains slashes, and I’m not sure how to escape them?

So, I need to do:

perl -e "s/FIND/REPLACE/g;" -pi $(find path/to/DIRECTORY -type f)

where FIND = ‘/string/path/term’
and REPLACE = ‘/string/path/newterm’

Answer 1

You could use other characters besides /. For example:

perl -e "s|FIND|REPLACE|g;" -pi $(find path/to/DIRECTORY -type f)

More info in http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Regexp-Quote-Like-Operators