mjhjmtu

I am writing a script to apply sed on certain files and then list files that have been changed so that I know which have been modified.

This is how I am finding and then using sed:

find . -type f -a ( -name "*.txt" -o -name "*.git") -a -exec sed -i -e "s/"str1"/"str2"/g" +

How do I print the file name of the changed files? I would like to print it in a sorted order so it's easier to read.

When using only sed we can do this:

sed -i 's/$pattern/$new_pattern/w changelog.txt' $filename
if [ -s changelog.txt ]; then
 # CHANGES MADE, DO SOME STUFF HERE
else
 # NO CHANGES MADE, DO SOME OTHER STUFF HERE
fi

But how do I do this when using find and sed together? I checked the man page and tried a bunch of stuff but nothing worked.

It should be easy enough to write a little script that does what you want and exec the script as an argument to find. You already have the script and if you replace $filename by $1, you have it. Your script will be of the form

#!/bin/bash
sed -i 's/$pattern/$new_pattern/' $1
echo $1 >> changelog

Let us call this script ed_notify. Now, you can run it on selected files by

cat changelog >> changelog.old
rm changelog
find . -type f -a ( -name "*.txt" -o -name "*.git") -a -exec ed_notify ;

Your sed command (with proper quoting):

sed 's/str1/str2/g'

This will change all occurrences of str1 into str2. A list of files containing str1 can be had from grep -l 'str1':

find . -type f ( -name '*.txt' -o -name '*.git ) 
 -exec grep -l 'str1' ; 
 -exec sed -i 's/str1/str2/g' + >changelist.txt

Here, grep -l will provide a list of pathnames that will be redirected into changelist.txt. It will also act like a filter for sed so that sed is only run on files that contain the pattern. sed -i will then make the changes in the files (and remain quiet).

Alternatively, let find print the pathnames of the files that contain the string:

find . -type f ( -name '*.txt' -o -name '*.git ) 
 -exec grep -q 'str1' ; 
 -print 
 -exec sed -i 's/str1/str2/g' + >changelist.txt

Related:

• Understanding the -exec option of `find`

sed -i rewrites the file (actually makes full new copies of the files) regardless of whether any of the s commands in the sed script succeeded or not.

Here, you'd want to avoid running sed -i on files that don't contain str1. With GNU tools:

find . -type f ( -name "*.txt" -o -name "*.git" ) -size +3c 
 -exec grep -lZ str1 + |
 while IFS= read -rd '' file; do
 sed -i 's/str1/str2/g' "$file" &&
 printf '%sn' "$file"
 done

That runs one sed for each of the files that contain str1 and prints the file names if sed has been successful (for which there has been no error in creating the new version of the file).

Or you can run one grep and sed per file:

find . -type f ( -name "*.txt" -o -name "*.git" ) ( -size +3c 
 -exec grep -q str1 ; 
 -exec sed -i 's/str1/str2/g' ; 
 -printf '"%p" was modifiedn' 
 -o -printf '"%p" was not modifiedn"' )