Bash Shell: Replace a String With Another String In All Files Using sed and Perl -pie Options

How do I replace a string with another string in all files? For example, ~/foo directory has 100s of text file and I'd like to find out xyz string and replace with abc. I'd like to use sed or any other tool to replace all occurrence of the word.

sed replace word / string syntaxThe sed command is designed for this kind of work i.e. find and replace strings or words from a text file under Apple OX, *BSD, Linux, and UNIX like operating systems. The perl can be also used as described below.

The syntax is as follows:
sed -i 's/old-word/new-word/g' *.txt

GNU sed command can edit files in place (makes backup if extension supplied) using the -i option. If you are using an old UNIX sed command version try the following syntax:

sed 's/old/new/g' input.txt > output.txt

You can use old sed syntax along with bash for loop:

#!/bin/bash
OLD="xyz"
NEW="abc"
DPATH="/home/you/foo/*.txt"
BPATH="/home/you/bakup/foo"
TFILE="/tmp/out.tmp.$$"
[ ! -d $BPATH ] && mkdir -p $BPATH || :
for f in $DPATH
do
  if [ -f $f -a -r $f ]; then
    /bin/cp -f $f $BPATH
   sed "s/$OLD/$NEW/g" "$f" > $TFILE && mv $TFILE "$f"
  else
   echo "Error: Cannot read $f"
  fi
done
/bin/rm $TFILE