find & sed (search and replace)

I’m using the following command on my mac:

$find . -name “*.java” -exec sed -i ’s/foo/bar/g’ {} ;

and it seems to have no effect.

I have two files in the directory that end in .java, which both have the foo text in them. Am I missing something?

EDIT :
Results from request of comments

[aafghani-03:~/test amirafghani]$ find . -name "*.java" -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} ;
sed: 1: "./bar.java": invalid command code .
sed: 1: "./foo.java": invalid command code .

Answers:

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Method 1

First of all, make sure you’re using regular ascii quotes like " and ' (ascii codes 0x22 and 0x27, respectively) in shell scripts, because the example in your post contains non-standard quote characters. If you look closely, they look a bit different. Most probably this is a copy-paste error from a rich text document format like Word, OOWriter, or even a browser window.

Since you’re on a Mac, you most probably have the FreeBSD implementation of sed, in which case you have to write the command this way:

find . -name "*.java" -exec sed -i '' "s/foo/bar/g" {} +

(here using + instead of ; to avoid running one sed invocation per file).

Note that those quotes around "s/foo/bar/g" are necessary if foo or bar have spaces.

In the FreeBSD implementation of sed the -i flag needs an argument: the extension of a backup file. For example with -i .bak the command would backup file1.txt as file1.txt.bak first before performing the replacement in the original file. Using an empty argument '' means to not use a backup file, which seems to be what you want.

The same thing in the GNU (or NetBSD, OpenBSD, busybox) implementation would be:

find . -name "*.java" -exec sed -i "s/foo/bar/g" {} +

Thank you @bahamat and @Mikel and @pieter-breed for improving my answer with your comments.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0