Find and Replace Inside a Text File from a Bash Command

The easiest way is to use sed (or perl):

sed -i -e 's/abc/XYZ/g' /tmp/file.txt

Which will invoke sed to do an in-place edit due to the -i option. This can be called from bash.

If you really really want to use just bash, then the following can work:

while IFS='' read -r a; do
    echo "${a//abc/XYZ}"
done < /tmp/file.txt > /tmp/file.txt.t
mv /tmp/file.txt{.t,}

This loops over each line, doing a substitution, and writing to a temporary file (don't want to clobber the input). The move at the end just moves temporary to the original name. (For robustness and security, the temporary file name should not be static or predictable, but let's not go there.)

For Mac users:

sed -i '' 's/abc/XYZ/g' /tmp/file.txt

(See the comment below why)

File manipulation isn't normally done by Bash, but by programs invoked by Bash, e.g.:

perl -pi -e 's/abc/XYZ/g' /tmp/file.txt

The -i flag tells it to do an in-place replacement.

See man perlrun for more details, including how to take a backup of the original file.

I was surprised when I stumbled over this...

There is a replace command which ships with the "mysql-server" package, so if you have installed it try it out:

# replace string abc to XYZ in files
replace "abc" "XYZ" -- file.txt file2.txt file3.txt

# or pipe an echo to replace
echo "abcdef" |replace "abc" "XYZ"

See man replace for more on this.

This is an old post but for anyone wanting to use variables as @centurian said the single quotes mean nothing will be expanded.

A simple way to get variables in is to do string concatenation since this is done by juxtaposition in bash the following should work:

sed -i -e "s/$var1/$var2/g" /tmp/file.txt

Bash, like other shells, is just a tool for coordinating other commands. Typically you would try to use standard UNIX commands, but you can of course use Bash to invoke anything, including your own compiled programs, other shell scripts, Python and Perl scripts etc.

In this case, there are a couple of ways to do it.

If you want to read a file, and write it to another file, doing search/replace as you go, use sed:

    sed 's/abc/XYZ/g' <infile >outfile

If you want to edit the file in place (as if opening the file in an editor, editing it, then saving it) supply instructions to the line editor 'ex'

    echo "%s/abc/XYZ/g
    w
    q
    " | ex file

Example is like vi without the fullscreen mode. You can give it the same commands you would at vi's : prompt.

I found this thread among others and I agree it contains the most complete answers so I'm adding mine too:

sed and ed are so useful...by hand. Look at this code from @Johnny: sed -i -e 's/abc/XYZ/g' /tmp/file.txt When my restriction is to use it in a shell script, no variable can be used inside in place of "abc" or "XYZ". The BashFAQ seems to agree with what I understand at least. So, I can't use: x='abc' y='XYZ' sed -i -e 's/$x/$y/g' /tmp/file.txt #or, sed -i -e "s/$x/$y/g" /tmp/file.txt but, what can we do? As, @Johnny said use a while read... but, unfortunately that's not the end of the story. The following worked well with me: #edit user's virtual domain result= #if nullglob is set then, unset it temporarily is_nullglob=$( shopt -s | egrep -i '*nullglob' ) if [[ is_nullglob ]]; then shopt -u nullglob fi while IFS= read -r line; do line="${line//''/$server}" line="${line//''/$alias}" line="${line//''/$user}" line="${line//''/$group}" result="$result""$line"'\n' done < $tmp echo -e $result > $tmp #if nullglob was set then, re-enable it if [[ is_nullglob ]]; then shopt -s nullglob fi #move user's virtual domain to Apache 2 domain directory ...... As one can see if nullglob is set then, it behaves strangely when there is a string containing a * as in: ServerName www.example.com which becomes

The most suitable solution I can think of with the given assumptions of the problem.

You can use sed:

sed -i 's/abc/XYZ/gi' /tmp/file.txt

You can use find and sed if you don't know your filename:

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i 's/abc/XYZ/gi' {} \;

Find and replace in all Python files:

find ./ -iname "*.py" -type f -exec sed -i 's/abc/XYZ/gi' {} \;

Be careful if you replace URLs with "/" character.

An example of how to do it:

sed -i "s%http://domain.com%http://www.domain.com/folder/%g" "test.txt"

Extracted from: http://www.sysadmit.com/2015/07/linux-reemplazar-texto-en-archivos-con-sed.html

If the file you are working on is not so big, and temporarily storing it in a variable is no problem, then you can use Bash string substitution on the whole file at once - there's no need to go over it line by line:

file_contents=$(</tmp/file.txt)
echo "${file_contents//abc/XYZ}" > /tmp/file.txt

The whole file contents will be treated as one long string, including linebreaks.

XYZ can be a variable eg $replacement, and one advantage of not using sed here is that you need not be concerned that the search or replace string might contain the sed pattern delimiter character (usually, but not necessarily, /). A disadvantage is not being able to use regular expressions or any of sed's more sophisticated operations.