Find and Replace on OS X without Sed

Last modified: 
Wednesday, August 12th, 2015
Topics: 
OSXperlsed

You may find the classic sed find and replace idiom doesn't work on Mac OSX owing to differences in GNU versus BSD syntax as well as character handling with "g" flag enabled.

sed -i '' 's,find,replace,g' file.txt

If the above is giving you errors like "sed: RE error: illegal byte sequence" and so forth, you can try using Perl instead. Yes, I said, "Perl."

perl -pi -w -e 's,find,replace,g;' file.txt


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