When doing this things in unix, I found the grep -r very useful, as it searches recursively and -l returns the mathcing file names. You can also pass -i option to sed to do the replace in-place. An empty parameter is passed to -i so no backups are created.


grep -lr $find $path | xargs sed -i'' "s|$find|$replace|g"


If you still want to keep track of the matched files you can use tee, which writes to a file and to standard output:


grep -lr $find $path | tee matchingfiles.txt | xargs sed -i'' "s|$find|$replace|g"


Thanks for your comment. So you’re actually pulling facebook user data through your web application? That’s also a good solution for this issue, but it didn’t fit our case because we wanted to avoid having server side code.