I use perl as a "slightly better sed", in particular the following commands I just cut and paste and modify for use, for many years now, to do (multi-)file search and replace:
``` # simple version: perl -p -i[.bak] -e 's/xxx/yyy/[g];' $(readlink somefile) # readlink is necessary do not clobber symlinks # hierarchical "find", handle ALL possible interesting filenames, including those that won't display: find target/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 perl -p -i[.bak] -e 's/xxx/yyy/[g];' ``` So I am a regular user of perl, and know almost nothing about it :) Perl is really great, even though I only know literally how to "sed" with it, and nothing else.
