Today I wanted to search and replace a string in some thousands of files. The way I did it is :

find . -name [pattern for file names] | xargs perl -pi 's/[search]/[replace]/g'

I wonder how Windows people do it. I am sure there is a shareware demo of some program somewhere with ten nice GUI screens (including an Installer with thirteen NEXT buttons and atleast two I AGREE buttons) to do this which will modify the registry in thousand other irrelevant places.