Jason Meridth published a wonderful one-liner back in 2013, for replacing a string that occurs anywhere within a repo. I find myself using it often, but not often enough to memorize it, so I’m shamelessly duplicating it here for posterity.

TL;DR

On Linux:

git grep -l 'original_text' | xargs sed -i 's/original_text/new_text/g'

On Mac:

git grep -l 'original_text' | xargs sed -i '' -e 's/original_text/new_text/g'

The -l argument to git grep only returns the file names and not the location in the file like it usually does.

The -e argument is needed with the sed portion on OSX.

Original post