I’ll throw in another example for folks using ag, The Silver Searcher to do find/replace operations on multiple files.
Complete example:
ag -l "search string" | xargs sed -i '' -e 's/from/to/g'
If we break this down, what we get is:
# returns a list of files containing matching string
ag -l "search string"
Next, we have:
# consume the list of piped files and prepare to run foregoing command
# for each file delimited by newline
xargs
Finally, the string replacement command:
# -i '' means edit files in place and the '' means do not create a backup
# -e 's/from/to/g' specifies the command to run, in this case,
# global, search and replace
sed -i '' -e 's/from/to/g'