sed -i command for in-place editing to work with both GNU sed and BSD/OSX

Question

I\'ve got a makefile (developed for gmake on Linux) that I\'m attempting to port to MacOS, but it seems like sed doesn\'t want to cooperate. What I

Answer 1

I came across this issue as well and thought of the following solution:

darwin=false;
case "`uname`" in
  Darwin*) darwin=true ;;
esac

if $darwin; then
  sedi="/usr/bin/sed -i ''"
else
  sedi="sed -i"
fi

$sedi 's/foo/bar/' /home/foobar/bar

Works for me ;-), YMMV

I work in a multi-OS team where ppl build on Windows, Linux and OS X. Some OS X users complained because they got another error - they had the GNU port of sed installed so I had to specify the full path.