global search and replace

[brian]

On Tue, 2003-05-13 at 10:22, pll at lanminds.com wrote:
> >vim supports most standard perl-esque regexp/search and replace type
> >functions.  You can do global search/replace in vi/vim with something
> >like:
> 
> Yeah, but how do you do this on thousands of files at once without 
> having to manually open each one, enter the editing sequence, then 
> save each file.

In writing my reply I overlooked the part about thousands of files at
once, my solution was more of an individual file-by-file process.  A
couple of others have already posted the "right" answer, which is to
essentially invoke perl from the command line, feeding it the files for
input.