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What is the method to find a particular file name in all subdirectories and modify a specific line pattern?

asked 2023-03-14 11:00:00 +0000

huitzilopochtli gravatar image

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answered 2021-12-28 17:00:00 +0000

devzero gravatar image

One possible method to find a particular file name in all subdirectories and modify a specific line pattern is:

  1. Open a terminal or command prompt window.
  2. Navigate to the root directory of the file tree where you want to search and modify files. For example, if you want to search the entire file system, you can use the command:

    cd /

  3. Use the find command to locate all files with the desired name pattern in all subdirectories. For example, if you want to find all files with the name "myfile.txt", you can use the command:

    find . -name "myfile.txt"

    This will search the current directory (.) and all its subdirectories for any files named "myfile.txt". You can replace "myfile.txt" with your desired file name pattern or path.

  4. Once you have found the target files, use a command-line text editor like sed to modify the specified line pattern. For example, if you want to replace all occurrences of "foo" with "bar" in the files found by find, you can use the command:

    find . -name "myfile.txt" -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} \;

    This will execute the sed command on each file found by find, replacing all instances of "foo" with "bar" in each file. The -i option means that the changes will be made in-place, i.e., the original file will be modified. The {} and \; syntax is necessary to pass the filename to sed for each file found by find.

  5. Wait for the find and sed commands to finish. Depending on the number of files and the size of the files, this process may take some time.

  6. Verify that the desired modifications have been made in the target files. You can use a text editor or cat command to view the contents of the modified files. For example:

    cat myfile.txt

    This will display the contents of myfile.txt in the terminal window. If the modifications were successful, you should see the changed line pattern, such as "bar" instead of "foo".

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Asked: 2023-03-14 11:00:00 +0000

Seen: 7 times

Last updated: Dec 28 '21