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Using vi to replace a string in multiple files

Sometime you may want to replace occurences of a string across multiple files.

There is an easy way to do so with the help of the vi editor.

This example will illustrate the power of vi:

Suppose you have 100 .html files, and you want to replace the occurence of the string ’2007′ with ’2008′.

As such, execute the following at your prompt:

vi *.html

This will open all the files ending with ‘.html’ in your current working directory. Then issue the following command:

:argdo %s/2007/2008/g | wq

That’s it! the above command will loop over each file, replacing (%) the word 2007 with the word 2008 globally (g) then it will save each file (w) and exit from it (q).

Note that the string to find and the string to use for replacement can be replaced with regular expressions. For instance, a caret (^) refers to the start of a line, the dollar sign ($) refers to its end, etc. So if we were to replace any line starting with ‘sample’ and ending with ‘test’, one could use:

:argdo %s/^sample.*test$/g | wc

where .* matches anything in between the two string.

Note too that you may do the find and replace action without respect to the case (i.e. a search for ‘word’ will match ‘WoRd’). For that matter, simply replace ‘/g’ with ‘/gi’

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 2:58 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

11 Responses to “Using vi to replace a string in multiple files”

  1. subhangi says:
    June 5, 2015 at 11:38 AM

    Awsome! Worked for me. Thanks

  2. Niall says:
    September 16, 2014 at 6:29 PM

    Awesome tip. Thank you so much for sharing came in life saver when had edit over 200 files.

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    September 3, 2013 at 11:23 AM

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  5. Deepanshu says:
    May 9, 2013 at 8:55 AM

    Thanks dude !!! Saved a lot of headache !!! :) :D

  6. thanks says:
    August 22, 2012 at 5:56 AM

    wow.. worked like a charm.. :)

  7. Himanshu says:
    May 24, 2012 at 8:37 AM

    thanks guys! this tip is a lifesaver.

  8. Than you very much says:
    September 27, 2010 at 1:49 PM

    Thanx a lot, it helped me too.

    I have a comment, for relatively small number of replacements, prompting for replace could also be useful.

    :argdo %s/search_string/replace_string/gc | wq

    with an additional ‘c’ for ‘confirmation’

    Thanks again :)

  9. Jens says:
    July 16, 2010 at 8:35 PM

    Thanks for this hint, you saved me a bunch of work with that.

  10. admin says:
    August 29, 2008 at 3:43 AM

    Must have been thinking about food when typing it :)
    Cheers

  11. mike says:
    August 23, 2008 at 12:24 PM

    it’s caret, not carrot!

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