replacing text in a bunch of files matching a certain pattern

Replace comes with mysql. It's a handy tool for sed/awk n00bs. This one I used to change some static paths while excluding all .svn folders and logfiles.

~$ replace '/var/www/mydir' '/var/www/newdir/' -- `grep --exclude-dir=.svn --exclude=*.log -clr "/var/www/mydir" ./*`

Of course there are other/better ways to accomplish this, look at this
http://www.brunolinux.com/02-The_Terminal/Find_and%20Replace_with_Sed.html