Replace comma with newline in sed on MacOS

Question

I have a file of id s that are comma separated   I m trying to replace the commas with a new line   I ve tried   sed  s    n g  file   but it is not working   What am I missing

User · Answer

The sed on macOS Mojave was released in 2005  so one solution is to install the gnu-sed  brew install gnu-sed  then use gsed will do as you wish  gsed  s    n g  file  If you prefer sed  just sudo sh -c  echo  usr local opt gnu-sed libexec gnubin  gt   etc paths d brew   which is suggested by brew info gnu-sed  Restart your term  then your sed in command line is gsed

User · Answer

Just to clearify  man-page of sed on OSX  10 8  Darwin Kernel Version 12 4 0  says          Sed Regular Expressions   The regular expressions used in sed  by default  are basic regular expressions  BREs  see re format 7  for more information   but extended   modern  regular expressions can be used instead if the -E flag is given   In addition  sed has the following two additions to regular  expressions    1    In a context address  any character other than a backslash         or newline character may be used to delimit the regular expression        Also  putting a backslash character before the delimiting character causes the character to be treated literally   For example  in the       context address  xabc xdefx  the RE delimiter is an   x   and the second   x   stands for itself  so that the regular expression is         abcxdef      2    The escape sequence  n matches a newline character embedded in the pattern space   You cannot  however  use a literal newline charac-       ter in an address or in the substitute command           so I guess one have to use tr - as mentioned above - or the nifty  sed  s    M  g    note  you have to type  lt ctrl -v  lt return  to get   M  in vi editor

User · Answer

If your sed usage tends to be entirely substitution expressions  as mine tends to be   you can also  use perl -pe instead    echo  foo bar baz    perl -pe  s     n g  foo  bar  baz

User · Answer

MacOS is different  there is two way to solve this problem with sed in mac   first  use      n   replace   n  it can work in MacOS   sed  s        n   g  file  the second  just use an empty line    sed  s      g  file  Ps  Pay attention the range separated by    the third  use gnu-sed replace the mac-sed

User · Answer

Apparently  r is the key      sed  s     r g  file3 txt  gt  file4 txt   Transformed this   ABFS  AIRM  AMED  BOSC  CALI  ECPG  FRGI  GERN  GTIV  HSON  IQNT  JRCC  LTRE  MACK  MIDD  NKTR  NPSP  PME  PTIX  REFR  RSOL  UBNT  UPI  YONG  ZEUS   To this   ABFS AIRM AMED BOSC CALI ECPG FRGI GERN GTIV HSON IQNT JRCC LTRE MACK MIDD NKTR NPSP PME PTIX REFR RSOL UBNT UPI YONG ZEUS

User · Answer

Though I am late to this post  just updating my findings  This answer is only for Mac OS X     sed  s new   gt   g  m1 json  gt  m2 json sed  1   s new   g   unescaped newline inside substitute pattern   In the above command I tried with Shift Enter to add new line which didn t work  So this time I tried with  escaping  the  unescaped newline  as told by the error     sed  s new    gt   g  m1 json  gt  m2 json    Worked   in Mac OS X 10 9 3

User · Answer

Use tr instead   tr     n   lt  file

User · Answer

To make it complete  this also works   echo  a b    sed  s       echo -e   n r

User · Answer

Use an ANSI-C quoted string   string   You need a backslash-escaped literal newline to get to sed   In bash at least      strings will replace  n with a real newline  but then you have to double the backslash that sed will see to escape the newline  e g   echo  a b    sed -e   s      n g    Note this will not work on all shells  but will work on the most common ones

User · Answer

FWIW  the following line works in windows and replaces semicolons in my path variables with a newline  I m using the tools installed under my git bin directory   echo  path    sed -e   s     n g    less

User · Answer

echo  PATH   sed -e   s      n g    usr local sbin  Library Oracle instantclient 11 2 sdk  usr local bin        Works for me on Mojave

User · Answer

This works on MacOS Mountain Lion  10 8   Solaris 10  SunOS 5 10  and RHE Linux  Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 3  Tikanga        sed  s  pattern    J g  foo txt  gt  foo2 txt       where the  J is done by doing ctrl v j  Do mind the   before the  J   PS  I know the sed in RHEL is GNU  the MacOS sed is FreeBSD based  and although I m not sure about the Solaris sed  I believe this will work pretty much with any sed  YMMV tho

User · Answer

sed  s      g    works on Mac OS X

[macos] Replace comma with newline in sed on MacOS?

Examples related to macos

Examples related to unix

Examples related to sed