Replace in files AND count number of replacements?

Question

I use the following line to replace a string in files:

ag -Q -l "$1" | xargs sed -i '' "s/$1/$2/g"

ag is the_silver_searcher, of course.

How can I also count the number of files that were affected by this change?

Answer 1

You could use tee in the pipe line and create a temporary file, then run wc -l to count the number of files (lines).

ag -Q -l "$1" | tee -a /tmp/num | xargs sed -i '' "s/$1/$2/g"; wc -l /tmp/num; rm /tmp/num