Question

I am trying to change the copyright headers in my assignment. I was able to list all the files with the copyright headers by using following commmand:

    grep -rni copyright *

By the above command, I got around 1000 files.

Can anyone please help me how to change all the files in one go?

Answer 1

This will apply a text change to files with the word “copyright” in them (case insensitive):

for filename in *; do
  if grep -qi "copyright" "$filename"; then
    sed -i'' -e 's/old text/new text/' "$filename"
  fi
done

Note that this only works on the current directory. To handle files in subdirectories, you’ll probably want to use the find command.

If you can describe the text change you want to make, we may be able to suggest more precise methods to achieve your goal.