Right Sed Fred!

I've been using the Stream Editor (sed) for the past few years, and especially love it's ability to do in-place editing of a file as per this example: -

sed -i'' "s/PidFile\ logs/PidFile\ ${Product}\/logs/g" /opt/ibm/HTTPServer/${Product}/conf/httpd.conf

so I was somewhat surprised to find it that it seemed to bork on macOS Catalina this morning: -

as per this terrible ( REALLY ) example: -

sed -i'' 's/PRIVATE/PUBLIC/g' dave.key 

sed: 1: "dave.key": extra characters at the end of d command

even though the same command worked on Ubuntu 18.04.02.

Assuming it to be a version thing, I checked the version of sed shipped with Ubuntu: -

sed --version

sed (GNU sed) 4.4

Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later .

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.

There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Jay Fenlason, Tom Lord, Ken Pizzini,

and Paolo Bonzini.

GNU sed home page: .

General help using GNU software: .

E-mail bug reports to: .

and, guess what, the --version or -v or --v switches don't even work on the macOS version :-( 

It transpires that the macOS version is based upon BSD Unix, which kinda makes sense given its roots from Mach etc.

This helped: -

BSD/macOS Sed vs. GNU Sed vs. the POSIX Sed specification

The key thing ....

On macOS, the cheat for in-place editing is simple ....

Rather than this: -

sed -i'' 's/PRIVATE/PUBLIC/g' dave.key 

I used this: -

sed -i '' 's/PRIVATE/PUBLIC/g' dave.key 

Yep, I added a space between -i and the single quote symbols !

PS Do NOT NOT NOT hand-edit your private OR public keys!!!