I'm more of a windows guy and am very novice when it comes to unix. I was trying to figure out how to do a find/replace searching in a specified path. I ended up writing it in Ruby. This is what I came up with.
require 'find'
if ARGV.size <= 3 || ARGV[0] == '-h'
puts "findreplace.rb Finds and replaces strings in the given directory."
puts "syntax: findreplace.rb PATH find_string replace_string [ignore_dirs]"
exit
end
Find.find(ARGV[0]) do |file_name|
if File.file? file_name
file = File.new(file_name)
lines = file.readlines
file.close
changes = false
lines.each do |line|
changes = true if line.gsub!(/#{ARGV[1]}/, ARGV[2])
end
# Don't write the file if there are no changes
if changes
file = File.new(file_name,'w')
lines.each do |line|
file.write(line)
end
file.close
end
end
Find.prune if ARGV[3] && file_name =~ /#{ARGV[3]}/
end

