How to check if sed has changed a file

Question

I am trying to find a clever way to figure out if the file passed to sed has been altered successfully or not.

Basically, I want to know if the file has been changed

Answer 1

In macos I just do it as follows:

changes=""
changes+=$(sed -i '' "s/$to_replace/$replacement/g w /dev/stdout" "$f")
if [ "$changes" != "" ]; then
  echo "CHANGED!"
fi

I checked, and this is faster than md5, cksum and sha comparisons