Unix Shell Loop through files and replace texts

To run sed on all the xml files, just specify the wildcard

sed "s/old_text/new_text/g" *.xml -i

To create a backup, just specify the extension after -i:

sed "s/old_text/new_text/g" *.xml -i~

Note that's usually better to use XML aware tools to handle XML.

For all .xml files that lie in the current directory:

sed -i.bak 's/old_text/new_text/g' *.xml

To recurse into subdirectories, combine with find:

find . -name '*.xml' -exec sed -i.bak 's/old_text/new_text/g' '{}' \;

The backup files will end in .xml.bak this way (the parameter to -i is appended to the original file name).

a practical shell script, if you intend to sanitize a bunch of files with a number of measures – things that will get a little impractical on a single line...

# only take files form certain subfolders and certain extensions# be careful to not tamper with .git or .svn folders # - thus excluding all hidden folders as an extra precaution# - also tampering with node_modules is a bad ideaFILES=$(find . -type f -regextype posix-extended     \    -regex "^\./(public|source)/.*\.(scss|js)$"         \    -not -regex ".*\/(\.|node_modules).*")for f in $FILESdoecho "Processing $f file..."# all files: prune trailing whitespace on each file.sed -i 's/ *$//' $fif [[ $f =~ \.js$ ]]; then    echo "javascript file!"    # DO stufffiif [[ $f =~ \.scss$ ]]; then    echo "scss file!"    # \b whole word matching – stackoverflow.com/a/1032039/444255    sed -i 's/\#000\b/black/g' $f    sed -i 's/\#000000\b/black/g' $f    sed -i 's/\#fff\b/white/g' $f    sed -i 's/\#ffffff\b/white/g' $ffidone

caveat: with great power comes great responsibility, and mass-replacement means great power...