Recursively Find and Replace in GNU/Linux

Web designers often link to index.html in directories throughout a Web site — or even worse, only partially throughout a Web site. If you are dealing with a static HTML site, it should be fairly easy to fix with this recipe.

The following line in the GNU/Linux terminal will find and replace (delete) the text index.html recursively in all files, starting in the current directory:

find ./* -type f -exec sed -i 's/index.html//g' {} \;

(Adapted from a LinuxForums.org post.)

You can then redirect all instances of index.html to the roots of the directories (the slash) with the following lines in the .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule index\.html$ http://www.example.com/%1 [R=301,L]