I use this script to search and replace the domain name in the WordPress database to adjust a fresh copy from the production site.
Replaces every occurence of ‘www.domainname.tld’ and ‘domainname.tld’ with ‘dev.domainname.tld’.
You then access the development site by adding it to your ‘hosts’ file or internal DNS.
#!/bin/sh
echo File: $1 Replace: $2
cp $1 $1.bak
perl -p -i -e "s|www\.$2|dev\.$2|g" $1
perl -p -i -e "s|://$2|://dev\.$2|g" $1