Previously, I covered a dead simple one-line Perl command to perform a string search and replace over multiple files on the Linux command prompt. While it did its job for me that day, today I had to do the same thing but this time recursively over all subdirectories.

For review, the Perl command to do a search and replace on a string is this:

perl -pi -e 's/search/replace/g;' *.txt

To get this to work over multiple files, we are going to rely on the grep command to perform a search for the string to replace and pipe back each file that contains the string in lieu of *.txt in the command above.

This is how it’s done:

perl -pi -e 's/search/replace/g;' `grep -ril search *`

The “search” string is the text you wish to replace and the “replace” string is what you want to replace the old text with.