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

If you need to do sed in-place in a bash script, and you do NOT want the in-place to result with .bkp files, and you have a way to detect the os (say, using ostype.sh), -- then the following hack with the bash shell built-in eval should work:

OSTYPE="$(bash ostype.sh)"

cat > myfile.txt <<"EOF"
1111
2222
EOF

if [ "$OSTYPE" == "osx" ]; then
  ISED='-i ""'
else # $OSTYPE == linux64
  ISED='-i""'
fi

eval sed $ISED 's/2222/bbbb/g' myfile.txt
ls 
# GNU and OSX: still only myfile.txt there

cat myfile.txt
# GNU and OSX: both print:
# 1111
# bbbb

# NOTE: 
# if you just use `sed $ISED 's/2222/bbbb/g' myfile.txt` without `eval`,
# then you will get a backup file with quotations in the file name, 
# - that is, `myfile.txt""`