So today I needed to replace a few hundred href link in varying content today. Here's my take on solving it. This works in zsh. I think for bash you need to add the do and done parts of the for loop, i'm not sure.
for file in `grep -lR "href=\"\/static\/" .`; sudo sed -i -e 's/href=\"\/static\//href=\"\/applications\/static\//g' $file
