Habla usted grep?
In the phylogenetic analyses of a manuscript draft, I accidentally named a species with the specific epithet “violaceae” where it should have been “violacea”. I had consistently used the wrong epithet for years, and countless subdirectories of subdirectories of subdirectories now contain analysis files that include the incorrect name.
How can this snafu be rectified in a reasonable time?
Recursive grep to the rescue …
grep -rl violaceae . | xargs sed -i 's/violaceae/violacea/g'
… and the world is fine again.