sed command with -i option failing on Mac but works on Linux

Question

I ve successfully used the following sed command to search replace text in Linux   sed -i  s old link new link g      However  when I try it on my Mac OS X  I get       command c expects   followed by text    I thought my Mac runs a normal BASH shell   What s up   EDIT   According to  High Performance  this is due to Mac sed being of a different  BSD  flavor  so my question would therefore be how do I replicate this command in BSD sed   EDIT    Here is an actual example that causes this   sed -i  s hello gbye g

User · Answer

Had the same problem in Mac and solved it with brew   brew install gnu-sed   and use as  gsed SED COMMAND   you can set as well set sed as alias to gsed  if you want    alias sed gsed

User · Answer

If you use the -i option you need to provide an extension for your backups   If you have   File1 txt File2 cfg   The command  note the lack of space between -i and    and the -e to make it work on new versions of Mac and on GNU    sed -i  original  -e  s old link new link g      Create 2 backup files like   File1 txt original File2 cfg original   There is no portable way to avoid making backup files because it is impossible to find a mix of sed commands that works on all cases    sed -i -e     - does not work on OS X as it creates -e backups sed -i   -e     - does not work on OS X 10 6 but works on 10 9  sed -i    -e     - not working on GNU   Note Given that there isn t a sed command working on all platforms  you can try to use another command to achieve the same result   E g   perl -i -pe s old link new link g

User · Answer

I ve created a function to handle sed difference between MacOS  tested on MacOS 10 12  and other OS   OS  uname      replace in file pattern file  function replace in file         if     OS     Darwin     then           for MacOS         sed -i    -e   1    2      else           for Linux and Windows         sed -i   -e   1    2      fi     Usage     replace in file  s MASTER HOST   MASTER HOST    MASTER IP        mysql  env     Where     is a delimeter   s MASTER HOST   MASTER HOST    MASTER IP     is pattern     mysql  env  is path to file

User · Answer

This works with both GNU and BSD versions of sed   sed -i   -e  s old link new link g      or with backup   sed -i  bak  -e  s old link new link g      Note missing space after -i option   Necessary for GNU sed

User · Answer

Or  you can install the GNU version of sed in your Mac  called gsed  and use it using the standard Linux syntax   For that  install gsed using ports  if you don t have it  get it at http   www macports org   by running sudo port install gsed  Then  you can run sed -i  s old link new link g

User · Answer

As the other answers indicate  there is not a way to use sed portably across OS X and Linux without making backup files  So  I instead used this Ruby one-liner to do so   ruby -pi -e  sub              config locales   yml   In my case  I needed to call it from a rake task  i e   inside a Ruby script   so I used this additional level of quoting   sh  q ruby -pi -e  sub              config locales   yml

User · Answer

Insead of calling sed with sed  I do   bin sed And this is the wrapper script in my   project bin sed    bin bash  if     quot  OSTYPE quot      quot darwin quot       then   exec  quot gsed quot   quot    quot  else   exec  quot sed quot   quot    quot  fi  Don t forget to chmod 755 the wrapper script

User · Answer

Sinetris  answer is right  but I use this with find command to be more specific about what files I want to change  In general this should work  tested on osx  bin bash    find   -name    smth  -exec sed -i     s text1 text2 g          In general when using sed without find in complex projects is less efficient

User · Answer

Here is an option in bash scripts     bin bash  GO OS   GO OS - quot linux quot    function detect os         Detect the OS name     case  quot   uname -s  quot  in       Darwin          host os darwin                  Linux          host os linux                             echo  quot Unsupported host OS  Must be Linux or Mac OS X  quot   gt  amp 2         exit 1                esac     GO OS  quot   host os  quot     detect os  if    quot   GO OS  quot      quot darwin quot     then     sed -i    -e     else     sed -i -e     fi

User · Answer

Your Mac does indeed run a BASH shell  but this is more a question of which implementation of sed you are dealing with   On a Mac sed comes from BSD and is subtly different from the sed you might find on a typical Linux box   I suggest you man sed

User · Answer

Here s how to apply environment variables to template file  no backup need    1  Create template with   FOO   for later replace   echo  Hello   FOO     gt  foo conf tmpl   2  Replace   FOO   with FOO variable and output to new foo conf file  FOO  world   amp  amp  sed -e  s   FOO    FOO g  foo conf tmpl  gt  foo conf   Working both macOS 10 12 4 and Ubuntu 14 04 5

User · Answer

sed -ie  s old link new link g     Works on both BSD  amp  Linux with gnu sed

User · Answer

I believe on OS X when you use -i an extension for the backup files is required  Try   sed -i  bak  s hello gbye g      Using GNU sed the extension is optional

[linux] sed command with -i option failing on Mac, but works on Linux

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