I have a directory that contains some subdirectories. I know there are two types of files, such as *A*.txt and *B*.txt, contain an "oldString" under that directory. I want to replace them with a "newString". Can I do this in one command? That is can I add the "*B*.txt" somewhere in this command:
find . -type f -name "*A*.txt" -exec sed -i 's/oldString/newString/g' {} \;
You can try:
find . -type f \( -name "*A*.txt" -o -name "*B*.txt" \) \
-exec sed -i 's/oldString/newString/g' {} +
(here also using + instead of ; to avoid running one sed invocation per file; also has the benefit of returning a non-zero exit status if any of the sed invocations return with a non-zero exit status).
If it really is just one letter, you can do this:
find . -type f -name "*[AB]*.txt" -exec sed -i 's/oldString/newString/g' {} \;
To be totally clear, this will only work if using a single letter as a match.
*foo*.txt or *bar*.txt for instance).
– Stéphane Chazelas
Dec 10 '19 at 14:32
If you have GNU find, you could use -regex instead of -name, and do something like
find . -type -f -regextype egrep -regex "(.*A.*|.*B.*)\.txt" -exec sed -i 's/oldString/newString/g' {} \;
Note that if the pattern can also appear in the directory path to the files, the regular expression needs to be modified (as per @StéphaneChazelas' comment) to be
-regex ".*(A|B)[^/]*\.txt"
to exclude anything where a / occurs after the patterns.
You can check if the regular expression type egrep is available using
find -regextype help
-regex matches on the full path, so it would match on a ./AFTER/foo.txt for instance. You'd need -regex '.*/[^/]*(A|B)[^/]*\.txt' for the A/B to only be looked for in the file's name.
– Stéphane Chazelas
Dec 10 '19 at 14:28
-namepatterns in afindcommand? – steeldriver Dec 10 '19 at 14:18