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Discussion on: Processing Text with Linux Shell - Part 1

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Replies for: Hi. I have never used any mac. Would you kindly provide details of sed -i behavior so I can update this article accordingly?

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Ben Sinclair • • Edited

BSD sed expects -i to take a file extension so it can save a backup.

Instead of using this:

sed -i YOUR_COMMANDS_HERE foo.txt

you can use something like the following, which will make a backup file and then immediately delete it if the command succeeded:

sed -i.bak YOUR_COMMANDS_HERE -- foo.txt && rm -- "foo.txt.bak"

That looks a little nasty, but it's portable; GNU sed's -i also takes a file extension as an optional argument.