built in unix / linux command for recursive find and replace?

Question

Many people string together find and sed, or perl, or any number of other unix commands to find and replace across multiple files. But, there's a simple command that can do it for you without the hassle. Thanks to The Digital Ninja for pointing out that it's rpl.

This is not a built in command but, for debian based distros like Ubuntu you can simply install it with sudo apt-get install rpl

I would guess that it's available through most package managers in other *nix OSs.

Answer 1

I belive you are thinking of 'rpl' http://www.linux.org/apps/AppId_2684.html

Answer 2

I think some variation of the following would work :

find . -name *.extension | perl -pi.bak -e "s/text_to_be_replaced/replacement/"