sed command with -i option failing on Mac, but wor

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' *

Answer 1

sed -ie 's/old_link/new_link/g' *

Works on both BSD & Linux

Answer 2

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 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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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)

Answer 6

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}