Find and Replace of All Names

Question

Background

I am new to linux/unix (I'm on a mac. Don't know which I am using), but someone made a lot of folders and files under the wrong name, and I need to go in and replace everything with the correct name. E.g. she named it apple instead of orange.

What I need to do

I navigated to the directory of interest, and within that directory, I need to:

1. Replace the word apple with orange in the name of any subfolder or file or directory

2. Replace the word apple with orange within any files (both text and non-text)

What I have tried

I tried this command:

grep -lr "apple" . | xargs sed -i "s/apple/orange/g"

and that didn't work at all

I also tried :

find ./ -exec sed -i 's/apple/orange/g' {} \;

This replaced a lot of the instances, but not all. And it does not replace the word within file/folder/directory names

Please help!

Answer 1

This might be more BASHy then is possible, but maybe it will help toward the right direction.

In short, find all the folders with apple, reverse the sort so that

/tmp/apple/test/apple

doesn't cause trouble when the first "apple" is changed out of order. Next feed the output into a while loop with the read function loading up a variable that holds all the folders that match. Finally, mv the folders into the right name structure.

for directories, try

find ./ -regex '^.*apple' -type d | sort -r | while read badname ; do mv $badname ${badname/%apple/orange}; done

for file names, (after directories are cleaned up )

find ./ -regex '^.apple.' -type f | sort -r | while read badname ; do mv $badname ${badname/apple/orange}; done

for file content there are many other examples of that,

Awk/Sed: How to do a recursive find/replace of a string?