Question

The below command will find all occurances of a string and delete the contents of the files where this string is found.

find / -maxdepth 1 -xdev -type f -exec grep -i "stringtofind" -l {} \; -exec sed -i '/./d' {} \;

I have tried modifying it to just delete the lines where the string is found but can’t get it to work.

E.g test file:

blah blah blah
blah blah blah teststring
teststringblah blah blah
blah blah blah

It would delete lines 2 and 3 and leave the file as without gaps between lines:

blah blah blah
blah blah blah

Answer 1

No need for grep here sed -i '/teststring/Id' file deletes all lines in file that contain teststring (case-insensitive) so just combined that with find:

find . -maxdepth 1 -xdev -type f -exec sed -i '/teststring/Id' {} \;

sed demo:

$ cat file
blah blah blah
blah blah blah teststring
teststringblah blah blah
blah blah blah

$ sed '/teststring/Id' file
blah blah blah
blah blah blah