In-place edits with sed on OS X

Question

I d like edit a file with sed on OS X   I m using the following command   sed  s oldword newword   file txt   The output is sent to the terminal   file txt is not modified   The changes are saved to file2 txt with this command   sed  s oldword newword   file1 txt  gt  file2 txt   However I don t want another file   I just want to edit file1 txt   How can I do this   I ve tried the -i flag   This results in the following error   sed  1   file1 txt   invalid command code f

User · Accepted Answer

You can use the -i flag correctly by providing it with a suffix to add to the backed-up file  Extending your example    sed -i bu  s oldword newword   file1 txt   Will give you two files  one with the name file1 txt that contains the substitution  and one with the name file1 txt bu that has the original content    Mildly dangerous  If you want to destructively overwrite the original file  use something like    sed -i     s oldword newword   file1 txt         note the space   Because of the way the line gets parsed  a space is required between the option flag and its argument because the argument is zero-length    Other than possibly trashing your original  I   m not aware of any further dangers of tricking sed this way  It should be noted  however  that if this invocation of sed is part of a script  The Unix Way    would  IMHO  be to use sed non-destructively  test that it exited cleanly  and only then remove the extraneous file

User · Answer

You can use   sed -i -e  s  lt string-to-find gt   lt string-to-replace gt     lt your-file-path gt    Example   sed -i -e  s Hello Bye   file txt   This works flawless in Mac

User · Answer

I ve similar problem with MacOS  sed -i     s oldword newword   file1 txt   doesn t works  but  sed -i any symbol   s oldword newword   file1 txt   works well

User · Answer

The -i flag probably doesn t work for you  because you followed an example for GNU sed while macOS uses BSD sed and they have a slightly different syntax  All the other answers tell you how to correct the syntax to work with BSD sed  The alternative is to install GNU sed on your macOS with  brew install gsed  and then use it instead of the sed version shipped with macOS  note the g prefix   e g  gsed -i  s oldword newword   file1 txt   If you want GNU sed commands to be always portable to your macOS  you could prepend  quot gnubin quot  directory to your path  by adding something like this to your  bashrc  zshrc file  run brew info gsed to see what exactly you need to do   export PATH  quot  usr local opt gnu-sed libexec gnubin  PATH quot   and from then on the GNU sed becomes your default sed and you can simply run  sed -i  s oldword newword   file1 txt

User · Answer

You can use -i    --in-place  for sed as already suggested  See  The -i in-place argument  however note that -i option is non-standard FreeBSD extensions and may not be available on other operating systems  Secondly sed is a Stream EDitor  not a file editor     Alternative way is to use built-in substitution in Vim Ex mode  like     ex   s foo bar g -scwq file txt   and for multiple-files     ex   bufdo  s foo bar g  -scxa       To edit all files recursively you can use        if shell supports that  enable by shopt -s globstar      Another way is to use gawk and its new  inplace  extension such as     gawk -i inplace    gsub  foo    bar        print    file1

User · Answer

sed -i --  s https http g  file txt

User · Answer

This creates backup files  E g  sed -i -e  s hello hello world   testfile for me  creates a backup file  testfile-e  in the same dir

[macos] In-place edits with sed on OS X

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