Find And Replace Specific Keyword In All Files From A Directory Recursively

If we intend to replace keyword '<abc>' with '<def>' in all *.java files from $ROOT_PATH, we can simply achieve this by:

find . -name "*.java" -print | xargs sed -i "" "s/<abc>/<def>/g"

The first part "find . -name "*.java" -print" will print all the relative paths of files which matches the pattern "*.java", just like:

./a.java
./dir1/b.java

Then all the output lines will be passed to sed command via xargs, thus the equivalent of the latter part is as below:

sed -i "" "s/<abc>/<def>/g" ./a.java
sed -i "" "s/<abc>/<def>/g" ./dir1/b.java

'-i' stands for:

-i[SUFFIX], --in-place[=SUFFIX]

    edit files in place (makes backup if extension supplied)

which will output the replaced file to a file.

But here's a tricky part. As mentioned above, the '-i' is optional on Ubuntu, whereas it is kind of mandatory to give '-i' a value in Mac osx, or some error like 'invalid command code .' could be thrown. Consequently, it is recommend that we add '-i ""' to our command, although it's a little bit cumbersome :)

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