Comments on: Quick note about sed’s edit in place option

By: Zachary Burke

Zachary Burke — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:01:00 +0000

Thank you for this post, 4 years later I’m blown away that my mac is using utilities written in 1977 that have apparently never been updated.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:55:00 +0000

Thanks, saved me a lot of frustration when I trying to run a script on os x that worked fine elsewhere!

By: Nathan Long

Nathan Long — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:54:00 +0000

It’s not dangerous at all if the files you’re working with are under version control. With git, starting from a clean commit, a simple `git diff` lets you verify that you’ve changed what you think you have.

Thanks for the post! You saved me some time.

By: me

me — Thu, 05 May 2011 01:47:00 +0000

Thanks! That was driving me nuts. I’m running MacOSX.

sed –version
sed: illegal option — -
usage: sed script [-Ealn] [-i extension] [file ...]
sed [-Ealn] [-i extension] [-e script] … [-f script_file] … [file ...]

By: Guest

Guest — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:05:00 +0000

Just a hint: If sed is used on symlinks, the link is destroyed and replaced by a copy of the link target.

By: Stealthcupcake

Stealthcupcake — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:52:00 +0000

Why don’t they just fix this? It is stupid to have an “edit in place” flag that doesn’t work unless you do some undocumented obscure thing that wastes a bunch of time to find on the internet.

By: Callum

Callum — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:49:34 +0000

$ sed –version
GNU sed version 4.2.1

$ sed -i ‘.orig’ -e ‘s/oranges/apples/’ file
Returns a misleading error about not being able to read .orig, turns out the space between the -i and the ‘.orig’ throws it off. Instead, this works as expected:
$ sed -i’.orig’ -e ‘s/oranges/apples/’ file

Thanks for the helpful article, congrats on being the first result for “sed in place” on Scroogle. :-)

By: hakova

hakova — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:47:51 +0000

Thanks, I was excited to find this, but I couldn’t get -i to work in FreeBSD 8.0 period; that is with or without extension. Always get the same error (‘sed: -i may not be used with stdin’) with all the example lines below:

sed -i ‘tmp’ -e ‘s/apples/oranges/’ sed -i '' -e 's/apples/oranges/' sed -i'' -e 's/apples/oranges/' sed -i' ' -e 's/apples/oranges/' and so forth.

These work:
sed 's/apples/oranges/' testnew.txt
sed -e’s/apples/oranges/’ testnew.txt
sed -e ‘s/apples/oranges/’ testnew.txt