Error when using 'sed' with 'find' command on OS X: "invalid command code ."

Question

Being forced to use CVS for a current client and the address changed for the remote repo. The only way I can find to change the remote address in my local code is a recursive search and replace.

However, with the sed command I'd expect to work:

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i "s/192.168.20.1/new.domain.com/" {} \;

I get an error for every file:

sed: 1: ".//file/path ...": invalid command code .

I've tried to escape the periods in the sed match/replacement but that doesn't solve anything.

Solution 1

If you are on a OS X, this probably has nothing to do with the sed command. On the OSX version of sed, the -i option expects an extension argument so your command is actually parsed as the extension argument and the file path is interpreted as the command code.

Try adding the -e argument explicitly and giving '' as argument to -i:

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i '' -e "s/192.168.20.1/new.domain.com/" {} \;

See this.

Solution 2

On OS X nothing helps poor builtin sed to become adequate. The solution is:

brew install gnu-sed

And then use gsed instead of sed, which will just work as expected.

Solution 3

You simply forgot to supply an argument to -i. Just change -i to -i ''.

Of course that means you don't want your files to be backed up; otherwise supply your extension of choice, like -i .bak.

Solution 4

Simply add an extension to the -i flag. This basically creates a backup file with the original file.

sed -i.bakup 's/linenumber/number/' ~/.vimrc

sed will execute without the error

Solution 5

Probably your new domain contain / ? If so, try using separator other than / in sed, e.g. #, , etc.

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i 's#192.168.20.1#new.domain.com#' {} \;

It would also be good to enclose s/// in single quote rather than double quote to avoid variable substitution or any other unexpected behaviour

View more solutions

Comments

[helion3]

The example command you give however, gives: sed: RE error: illegal byte sequence

[damienfrancois]

That most probably is a copy-paste encoding problem as it works with no problem in my tests. See this

[acheron55]

If you spent 10 min like I did finding the difference, it is -e option

[damienfrancois]

@acheron55 I updated my answer to be explicitly about the -e option

[JonasVautherin]

This question answers the RE error: illegal byte sequence on MacOS.

[Pierre Houston]

i used an empty string '' as the parameter for -i and that worked, like sed -i '' 's/blah/xx/g'

[mdup]

For me, adding -e after -i made sed backup all my files in this way: "foo.txt" -> "foo.txt-e". Obviously what I wanted was rather -i '', i.e. don't backup changed files.

[mdup]

I definitely am on OS X default sed, not homebrew'd. Mavericks 10.9.3 (maybe sed differs with OS X versions?). No worries, I've added the answer I'd like to have had (and I guess it would have solved the OP's problem as well).

[aspyct]

Same problem for me. This -i -e combined with a find resulted in many many files ending in -e-e-e-e-e-e-e.

[Joost]

Same here, using the sed that ships with 10.10. I recommend -i ''

[mdup]

I find it funny how you edited your answer to make it look like mine :) Anyway, as long as users solve their problems, I don't care. Cheers!

[damienfrancois]

@mdup I updated my answer after your comment, which I could not verify on my system, but which was backed up by several other commenters. My edit dates Oct 1 '15 at 4:44 and your answer is dated Oct 2 '14 at 8:54. Cheers.

[JDS]

You can solve this, and all the other problems with macOS, by installing Gnu versions of everything

[Darrell Teague]

A working revised answer on OSX is: find ./ -type f -exec sed -ie "s/192.168.20.1/new.domain.com/" {} \;

[bentael]

is there a version where the same command would work for both OS X and Linux?

[damienfrancois]

@bentael Using Homebrew on OS X you can install the GNU sed which is the one installes on Linux.

[Stephen Shank]

Thank you for this answer, which worked great for me! Working on both Linux and Mac, I'd much prefer access to a familiar tool than learning arcane differences between two closely related ones.

[Jaime Hablutzel]

@bentael if you don't want to install an alternative sed see stackoverflow.com/questions/5694228/…

[Jeppe Gravgaard]

Thanks - worked for me too. A nice little tip is to set up an alias like alias sed='gsed' to make the alignment between macOS and linux complete.

[Tom Grushka]

Why is this upvoted 578 times? Creates many backup files ending in ".oldext-e"

[Hamza A.Malik]

Thank youuuu! Been trying to write a script for generating an app and have been searching around for the past couple of hours for this.

[tripleee]

The OS generally does no such thing. Did you copy/paste from a blog or a word processor or something?

[Ricardo Gonçalves]

@tripleee you're right! Updated my answer.

[tripleee]

So the real lesson here is never use a word processor for code. There are some blog platforms which unfortunately apply "styling" to code and thus breaking it, which you as a consumer of that blog can't really do much about.

[tripleee]

(Also, irritatingly, the keyboard substitution facility on IOS will "helpfully" replace ASCII quotes with "typographic" ones no matter what you do, so it's not great for saving snippets of code.)