CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unixsed
Tentatively
Tentatively

Reputation: 51

Substitute in sed not changing files

Apologies if this has been covered before, I had a search but couldn't find anything. I realise this is probably a simple error, but I'm currently learning UNIX.

I've been trying to do a sed substitution but every time I've tried the command just seems to print out the files and not substitute anything?

The command in question is:

find . -name 'config.xml' -exec sed 's/<name>development<\/name>/<name>releases<\/name>/g' {} \;

After I run this command, if I try to find and grep for <name>development<\/name> it still returns results. Why?

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 87

Answers (1)

Will
Will

Reputation: 24739

This is because you're not actually editing the file--just printing the edited version to stdout. Use sed's -i flag:

-i[SUFFIX]
--in-place[=SUFFIX]
This option specifies that files are to be edited in-place. GNU sed does this by creating a temporary file and sending output to this file rather than to the standard output.(1).

So:

find . -name 'config.xml' -exec sed -i  's/<name>development<\/name>/<name>releases<\/name>/g' {} \;

You can also use a different character besides / if you don't want to have to escape them:

find . -name 'config.xml' -exec sed -i  's@<name>development</name>@<name>releases</name>@g' {} \;

Upvotes: 2

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