Shell fun with sed and xargs

I cleaned up my life on the road polluted links by running

rg -l 'my path for \[\[Life on the road\]\]' --null | xargs -I % -0 sed -i '' 's/\[\[Life on the road\]\]/life on the road/g' "%"

The breakdown is that

• rg -l 'regexPattern' gets a list of files with the pattern in the current directory (my Obsidian vault).
• --null puts a null terminator at the end of the list of files output by rg. On the other side of the pipe, -0 tells xargs to expect its arguments to end in null terminators. This allows filenames to contain quotes and importantly, apostrophes '.
• xargs -I % templateCommand replaces % inside templateCommand with each file passed via stdin
• sed -i '' 's/search/replace/g filePath replaces all instances of search with replace inside filePath

Helpful for Programming.