more seriously, we need a bit more information in order to help you: what are "elements"? Are you talking about replacing tag names in some marked-up text (HTML, XML...) or just plain strings?

For plain strings a variation of perl -i.bak -p -e's/foo/bar/g' my_file would work.

For tagged text, use of an XML/HTML parser is usually advised. An example would be perl -MXML::Twig -e'XML::Twig->parse( twig_handlers => { foo => sub { $_->set_tag( "bar") }, $ARGV[0])->print' my_file.xml > new_file.xml (also works with HTML).

Both examples use unix quotes, I guess you need to swap ' and " in windows.

And of course the real thing would probably not be a one-liner, start with use strict; use warnings;, set up a hash initial_element => replacement... try it, and if you hit a problem, show us your code, the initial data, the output and the expected output and we will be able to help.

perl -pi -e 's/searchterm/replaceterm/' *.c

perl -pi -i.bak -e 's/searchterm/replaceterm/' *.c
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yes