macos - sed command with -i option failing on Mac, but works on Linux

Question

I've successfully used the following sed command to search/replace text in Linux:

sed -i 's/old_link/new_link/g' *

However, when I try it on my Mac OS X, I get:

"command c expects followed by text"

I thought my Mac runs a normal BASH shell. What's up?

EDIT:

According to @High Performance, this is due to Mac sed being of a different (BSD) flavor, so my question would therefore be how do I replicate this command in BSD sed?

EDIT:

Here is an actual example that causes this:

sed -i 's/hello/gbye/g' *

Answer 1

If you use the -i option you need to provide an extension for your backups.

If you have:

File1.txt
File2.cfg

The command (note the lack of space between -i and '' and the -e to make it work on new versions of Mac and on GNU):

sed -i'.original' -e 's/old_link/new_link/g' *

Create 2 backup files like:

File1.txt.original
File2.cfg.original

There is no portable way to avoid making backup files because it is impossible to find a mix of sed commands that works on all cases:

• sed -i -e ... - does not work on OS X as it creates -e backups
• sed -i'' -e ... - does not work on OS X 10.6 but works on 10.9+
• sed -i '' -e ... - not working on GNU

Note Given that there isn't a sed command working on all platforms, you can try to use another command to achieve the same result.

E.g., perl -i -pe's/old_link/new_link/g' *