sed: 1: "./...": invalid command code .

[jab]

First off, thanks for this script, can't wait to use it once I can get it to work. For now though, when I run it I sed gives the error above many times.

I'm using Mac OS X 10.6.1 /usr/bin/sed, which doesn't seem to have a --version option, but the sed manpage has the date May 10, 2005 at the bottom as well as the following note:

 The -E, -a and -i options are non-standard FreeBSD extensions and may not be
 available on other operating systems.

[michaeljones]

Cheers for pointing that out. Might be able to get around it using a tmp file to store the processing output and then cat-ing it back into the file. I'll have a look.

[jab]

Looks like in this version of sed, -i takes a mandatory extension argument, so that when editing files in-place, it will create backups with the specified extension. You can pass a zero-length argument however to forgo backups:

$ echo foo > test
$ sed -i "" s/foo/bar/ test
$ cat test
bar

[michaeljones]

Thanks for the additional info, it seems that for portability and speed it might be reasonable to rewrite this in Python (someone has already done it) so I might switch over to that. Save on these little issues, even though the bash implementation has a old school charm to it.

[michaeljones]

Switched to a Python implementation now.