goreplace is a simple utility which can be used as replacement for grep + sed combination in one of most popular cases - find files, which contain something, possibly replace this with something else.

You can download latest release of goreplace from GitHub's downloads.

But it's suited to be installed via go tool, so you can do usual thing:

go get github.com/piranha/goreplace

And you should be done. You have to have $GOPATH set for this to work (go will put sources and generated binary there). Add -u flag there to update your goreplace.

I prefer name gr to goreplace, so I link gr somewhere in my path (usually in ~/bin) to $GOPATH/bin/goreplace.

Usage is pretty simple, you can just run gr to see help on options. Basically you just supply regexp (or a simple string - it's a regexp always as well) as an argument and goreplace will search for it in all files starting from the current directory, just like this:

gr somestring

Some directories and files can be ignored by default (gr is looking for your .hgignore/.gitignore in parent directories), just run gr without any arguments to see help message - it contains information about them.

If you need to replace found strings with something, just pass -r replacement option and they will be replaced in-place. No backups are made (not that you need them, right? You're using version control, aren't you?). Unfortunately only plain strings are supported as replacement, no regexp submatch support yet (planned, though).