Find and replace in file and overwrite file doesn't work, it empties the file

Question

I would like to run a find and replace on an HTML file through the command line.

My command looks something like this:

sed -e s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STR         


        

Answer 1

To change multiple files (and saving a backup of each as *.bak):

perl -p -i -e "s/\|/x/g" *  

will take all files in directory and replace | with x this is called a “Perl pie” (easy as a pie)