How to rename files recursively in Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "lenny"

Recently I have mirrored some website to my local disk. I found that most pages were stored in files with ".php" extension. Those files were plain HTML, but my web browser has flatly refused to display them. Yes, I confess, I simply overlooked a very useful wget option - "--html-extension" :)

I didn't want to download everything again, so I decided to simply rename all *.php to *.html, and fix the links inside so they were pointing to renamed files. It proved to be not an easy task for a novice Linux user such as myself :)

The following command recursively replaces the extension ".php" to ".html", starting from the current directory:

find . -name *.php -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I '{}' rename 's/\.php/\.html/' '{}'

Now fixing hyperlinks inside the web pages:

find . -name *.html -exec sed -i 's/\.php/\.html/' '{}' \;

That's it :)