replace

replace is a command line utility for performing search-and-replace on files. It's similar to sed but there are a few differences:

• Modifies files when matches are found
• Recursive search on directories with -r
• Uses JavaScript syntax for regular expressions and replacement strings.
• Asynchronous, but still slower than grep.

Install

With node.js and npm:

npm install replace -g

Examples

Replace all occurrences of "var" with "let" in files in the current directory:

replace 'var' 'let' *

Replace in all files in a recursive search of the current directory:

replace 'var' 'let' . -r

Replace only in test/file1.js and test/file2.js:

replace 'var' 'let' test/file1.js test/file2.js

Replace all word pairs with "_" in middle with a "-":

replace '(\w+)_(\w+)' '$1-$2' *

Replace only in files with names matching *.js:

replace 'var' 'let' . -r --include="*.js"

Don't replace in files with names matching *.min.js and *.py:

replace 'var' 'let' . -r --exclude="*.min.js,*.py"

Preview the replacements without modifying any files:

replace 'var' 'let' . -r --dry-run

See all the options:

replace -h

More Details

Search

There's also a search command. It's like grep, but with replace's syntax, and slower!

search "setTimeout" . -r

Excludes

By default, replace and search will exclude files (binaries, images, etc) that match patterns in the "defaultignore" located in this directory.

On huge directories

replace will sputter on recursive searches of enormous directories. This ain't C. If replace is taking too long, try turning on the quiet flag with -q or only including the necessary file types with --include.

If there are too many files in the directory, node will throw a EMFILE, Too many open files. Check your command line then try a synchronous search with --synchronous

What it looks like