sed in-place flag that works both on Mac (BSD) and Linux

Question

Is there an invocation of sed todo in-place editing without backups that works both on Linux and Mac? While the BSD sed shipped with OS X seems to

Answer 1

Here's another version that works on Linux and macOS without using eval and without having to delete backup files. It uses Bash arrays for storing the sed parameters, which is cleaner than using eval:

# Default case for Linux sed, just use "-i"
sedi=(-i)
case "$(uname)" in
  # For macOS, use two parameters
  Darwin*) sedi=(-i "")
esac

# Expand the parameters in the actual call to "sed"
sed "${sedi[@]}" -e 's/foo/bar/' target.file

This does not create a backup file, neither a file with appended quotes.