How to edit all files containing a particular string

It's often useful to be able to automatically open all files with a particular string (say, to rename a variable throughout your code). To do this with ack, and open all files containing my_string in vim, just type:

vim $(ack -l my_string)

It can be accomplished in a similar way with grep instead of ack.


Edit: If you just want to search and replace a particular string in all files under some directory recursively, use

grep -rl matchstring somedir/ | xargs sed -i "" 's/search string1/search string2/'

It took me a while to find that the double quotes after -i are necessary on Mac OS X. And be aware that the single quotes above usually get mangled to be backticks when copying and pasting.

Edit 2: Don't do this in the root directory of a git repository! It will corrupt the repository.

More KAUST Beacon photos

The shot of the Beacon in my last post was taken with my iPhone, so last night I went back and got some "real" shots with a tripod and DSLR. Click to see them large, they're better that way.

It's quite a striking structure, up close, especially now that it's fully lit.

The KAUST Beacon is fully lit

I believe today is the first time:

As a new "House of Wisdom," the University shall be a beacon for peace, hope, and reconciliation...

...this university will become a House of Wisdom to all its peers around the world, a beacon of tolerance.

--King Abdullah

Mendeley's PDF import has improved dramatically

Looks like the folks at Mendeley have been quietly making some big improvements.

When I first started using Mendeley, I decided to drag a folder of one hundred or so PDFs into it, since it could extract the bibliographic metadata from PDFs. The consequences were disastrous, with a dozen documents named "Society" and all published in "Science". Overall, less than half were correctly imported, and many entries were unrecognizable.

Since then, I don't drag PDFs into Mendeley. This means that bringing in a new document requires a few steps: get the metadata from a journal webpage (automatically using a bookmarklet), download the PDF, and finally associate the PDF to the document.

Today, by accident, I happened to drag a PDF into Mendeley. To my surprise, it was imported perfectly, with all bibliographic data correct. I decided to try another. And a few more. All came in perfectly. I also found that dragging a PDF of a paper already in my library DID NOT create a duplicate.

Thanks, Mendeley developers. Please keep it up.