The Wikipedia article on find is great.
Searching
To check for the existence of the string in any of the files in the directory structure:
find . -exec grep -H “searchstring” ‘{}’ \; -print
On Solaris ommit the ‘-H’.
or using grep only:
grep -r “searchstring” /tmp
Replacing
Find in the current directory (.) type file then execute a sed inline and replace ‘fromstring’ with ‘tostring’:
find . -type f -exec sed -i ‘s#fromstring#tostring#’ {} \;
On Solaris I found it necessary to explicitly point to the gnu sed:
find . -type f -exec /usr/local/bin/sed -i ‘s/fromstring/tostring/’ {} \;
The normal convention is to use ‘/’ as the sed delimiter but other characters can be used.
It will also be necessary to escape regular expression characters in the sed statement so a forward slash ‘/’ would need escaped to ‘\/’. Other characters which may need escaping
. * [ ] ^ $ \
