“Recursive text substitution in multiple files is not a
task that the average end user is called upon to perform very
often. But let’s suppose that you have a couple of web sites either
with a hosting company or on your own server. Let us suppose
further, that you want to change the mailto link address on every
page on your site. Not a problem if you only have 5 or 6 pages but
what if you have five or six hundred? Clearly, in the absence of an
automated text replacement utility, you are going to be spending a
lot of quality time with the WISYWIG editor of your choice.“Of course you could always employ the venerable ‘sed’ command
with ‘find’ and ‘exec’ but that has limitations and the syntax is
possibly the most bizarre and grotesque construction in the whole
of Unix…!”