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Perl: Simple search and replace in multiple files
Problem:
How to search and replace a string in multiple files?
 
Solution:
"perl -pi -w -e 's/search/replace/g;' *.txt"

'search' is a regular expression. This means you have to escape most special characters with a backslash (\) and you can add lots of advanced stuff like pattern matching, look-ahead, look-behind etc.

-p loop through parameters (in this case, all files matching*.txt)
-i edit in-place
-w enable warnings
-e execute the quoted script

Google 'regular expressions' or 'perlretut' to learn more about how to do really cool stuff with regular expressions.
 
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