Linux tip - Find and replace in vi

To find and replace one or more occurences of a given text pattern with a
new text string, use the s[ubstitute] command.

There are a variety of options, but these are what you most probably want:

:%s/foo/bar/g find each occurance of 'foo' and replace it with 'bar' without asking for confirmation

:%s/foo/bar/gc find each occurance of 'foo' and replace it with 'bar' asking for confirmation first

:%s//bar/gc find (match exact word only) and replace each occurance of 'foo' with 'bar'

:%s/foo/bar/gci find (case insensitive) and replace each occurance of 'foo' with 'bar'

:%s/foo/bar/gcI find (case sensitive) and replace each occurance of 'foo' with 'bar'


NB: Without the 'g' flag, replacement occurs only for the first occurrence in each line.

For a full description and some more interesting examples of the substitute command refer to

:help substitute

See also:

:help cmdline-ranges
:help pattern
:help gdefault

To find out more check out:
http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=31