permission denied when sed in place edit in mingw

Question

I\'m using mingw.

  $ sed -i \"s/a/b/\" test.txt
  sed: preserving permissions for `./sed003480\': Permission denied

I can touch/rm files in cu

Answer 1

TL;DR: Used sudo

---

In my case, I was running a bash script running on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as follows:

./generate.sh

The script created a bunch of files however, for reasons unknown, sed was denied permission to modify the permissions on these files for some reason:

The actual sed command was used to perform a search-replace that looked a bit like this:

grep -rl $PATTERN $PUBLIC_API_FOLDER/ \
    | xargs sed -i 's/$PATTERN/$REPLACE/g'

As you can see, despite not having elevated priviledges at any point, I nevertheless was unable to modify the files the script created:

sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/models/sedt0qk4D’: Operation not permitted
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/models/sedOxoc1O’: Operation not permitted
sed: cannot rename public_api/models/sedOxoc1O: Permission denied
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/controllers/sedx5BafW’: Operation not permitted
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/models/sedVkdqzc’: Operation not permitted
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/models/sedLvyS3s’: Operation not permitted
sed: cannot rename public_api/models/sedLvyS3s: Permission denied
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/controllers/sedE7GSe8’: Operation not permitted
sed: cannot rename public_api/controllers/sedE7GSe8: Permission denied
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/controllers/sednHZBQf’: Operation not permitted
sed: cannot rename public_api/controllers/sednHZBQf: Permission denied

The solution in my case was to simply run the script with sudo.

sudo ./generate.sh