having spent the morning trying to work out how to pipe file paths from find into a perl edit-in-place operation, I thought i might as well leave the answer here for other searchers: Use xargs, in short, to pass the results in a properly separated way to the perl command.
(man xargs, man find and perldoc perlrun for the details.)
This example replaces all instances of /images/ with /other_images/ in all *.html files in or beneath the current directory.
find . -iname "*.html" -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 perl -pi.bak -e "s/\/im
+ages\//\/other_images\//ig"
#or revised following comments below (for which thanks):
find . -iname "*.html" -print0 | xargs -0 perl -pi.bak -e "s/\/images\
+//\/other_images\//ig"
