I was google searching and found
Perl as a command line utility tool
This almost solves my problem:
find . | xargs perl -p -i.old -e 's/oldstring/newstring/g'
I think this would create a new file for every file in my directory tree. Most of my files will not contain oldstring and I don't want to make a copy of them.
How would I filter it thru grep first so I only perform search and replace on those files that have something to replace?
Also: how do I avoid running perl on directories. I looked at the "man find" on cygwin (sorry, I'm using cygwin on windows, please don't shoot me).
I tried
/usr/bin/find . -empty -prune
but this did not omit the directory files. Is this a bug in cygwin? I don't want to run perl on my directory files!
Thanks,
Siegfried