sed command is not working on windows 10

Question

I tried to run the below command in my windows 10 machine. Here, new text file contains some text like this 'how are you?'. I want to replace the string 'how'->'where' in that same file without creating a new file. But It shows error. Any comments to resolve it?

sed -i s/how/where/ new.txt

sed: invalid option -- i

Solution

Your version of sed (GNU sed version 3.02), does not support the -i option. You can either update to a more recent version of sed (version 4.2.1 is available here), or work around the issue by redirecting to a temporary file and then copying it to the source file:

C:\>cat.exe foo.txt
foo
how
bar
baz
foo how bar

C:\>sed.exe s/how/where/ foo.txt > foo2.txt

C:\>move /Y foo2.txt foo.txt
        1 file(s) moved.

C:\>cat.exe foo.txt
foo
where
bar
baz
foo where bar

Comments

[Sundeep]

what is the output of sed --version ?

[VijayVishnu]

@spasic GNU sed version 3.02

[Sundeep]

I think that version doesn't have inplace editing option.. you can try a workaround: sed 's/how/where/' new.txt > tmp.txt && mv tmp.txt new.txt or use perl if it is available

[VijayVishnu]

where to get the latest sed?@spasic

[VijayVishnu]

unxutils.sourceforge.net this was having latest version 3.02 only

[Sundeep]

no idea, this might help: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/111673/… and stackoverflow.com/questions/7232797/…

[Tim]

I downloaded UnxUpdates.zip from unxutils.sourceforge.net and it contained GNU sed version 4.0.7, which supports the -i option. Can you make sure you have the latest version installed?