WARNING!

MAKE BACKUP of current folder before proceeding!

that being said, this search replace script works with the tool sed which required to escape all special characters.

This tool will help with that: https://dwaves.de/tools/escape/

per default it will search the current folder the user is in.

# make backup of current folder
mkdir /root/backups
tar fcvz /root/backups/backup_of_current_folder.tar.gz .

# make new file
vim /root/scripts/global-search-replace.sh
# with content

#!/bin/bash
echo "=== global-search-replace.sh v1.0 ==="
echo "WARNING! MAKE BACKUP OF ALL FILES BELOW . BEFORE PROCEEDING!"
echo "INPUT ONLY SED ESCAPED STRINGS! (https://dwaves.org/tools/escape/)"
echo "(hit enter to continue searching for:"
echo "FILETYPE: "
echo "$1"
echo "and replace all:"
echo "$2"
echo "with:"
echo "$3"
echo "in all files in all sub-folders of the current dir)"

read input

THIS=$2
# shall become
THAT=$3

find . -type f -iname "$1" -exec sed --debug -i "s/$THIS/$THAT/g" {} \;

make runnable:

chmod +x /root/scripts/*.sh

usage:

/root/scripts/global-search-replace.sh "*.txt" '\ ' ' '

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