Laravel Elixir version images which are linked via SASS/CSS

I'm fairly new to Laravel 5.0, but not to PHP. I've been playing around with Elixir to compile my SASS, copy images from my resource directory and run them through the mix.version function to prevent caching.

This works great for CSS, images and JavaScript, however; is it possible to have Elixir version images linked in my CSS/SASS too? Sure it's easily enough to version the images but is there a way of adjusting the CSS to reflect the new filenames?

I discovered this: http://ift.tt/1LZ14sO which allows you to append a query parameter to the file paths in a CSS file, so that is half of the problem solved. I would be quite happy to use this if it were possible to automatically change the query parameter each time gulp runs.

Any thoughts on how this can be achieved, or if it is even possible?

The reasons I would like to do this is I'm constantly developing my app and I use a large sprite sheet which is often rearranged, cache busting is a requirement, and if it could be automatic when gulp runs that would save me a lot of time and effort.

Thanks

via Chebli Mohamed