sed - is useful to find and replace text in single multiple files. * Replacing foo with foo_bar in a single file. sed -i 's/foo/foo_bar/g' somefile.module o -i = tell sed to edit the file(s) o s = substitute the following text o foo = what you want to substitute o foo_bar = what you want to replace o g = global, match all occurrences in the line # Replacing foo with foo_bar in a multiple files. sed -i 's/foo/foo_bar/g' *.module ## # recursive find/replace # find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/foo/bar/g'