So I've been working on a relatively large project by myself, and I've come to realise that some of the variable names earlier on were.. less than ideal.

But how does one change variable names in a project easily? Is there such a tool that can go through a project directory, parse all the files, and then replace the variable names to the desired one? It has to be smart enough to understand the language I imagine.

I was thinking of using regexp (sed/awk on linux?) tools to just replace the variable name, but there were many times where my particular variable is also included as a part of strings.

There's also the issue about changing stuff on a c++ namespace, because there is actually two classes in my project that share the same name, but are in different namespaces.

I remember visual stuio being able to do this, but what's the safest and most elegant way to do this on linux?