Find and replace string within files in an entire directory tree

This will allow you to change a string within all files in an entire directory structure. I had taken on a project from a client that had a static website and whomever had created it, using whatever system they decided on, used a really crappy file name structure. Since everything was flat-file, to change a files name and location required editing all other files and updating the menu link.

The following two commands do the same thing, one uses SED and the other PERL. It’s your choice.

The backslashes before the .html escape the period character as it typically is a special character in regular expressions.

# PERL:
find ~/location/ -name "*.*"|xargs perl -w -i -p -e "s/What To Find/Replace With What/g"

# SED:
find ~/location/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -e 's/my-silly-home-page-name\.html/index\.html/g' -i

Find string in directory tree

find . -type d -name "*whatever*" -print

Find string in specific file by name

grep --include=config.php -rnw . -e 'db_user_name'

find ./wwwroot/ -maxdepth 2 -name 'config.php' -exec grep db_host_name {} \; -print

Replace space in directory name with underscore

find . -exec rename -n 's/ /_/g' '{}' \;

find . -type f -exec rename -n 's/ /_/g' '{}' \;

Replace string in directory name

find ~/location/ -type f -not -path "./.git/*" -execdir rename 's/FindThis/ReplaceWithThis/' '{}' \;

Restore Default Directory Permissions

find . -not -path . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Delete empty directories

find -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

# rmdir: failed to remove '.': Invalid argument
# ^^ means you ran it on an already empty folder, it cannot remove a folder you're already in.

Directory file count

find DIR_NAME -type f -print | wc -l

Notes

Use -iname for case-insensitive searching.