Prevent sed from creating a temporary file

Question

I'm injecting a proxy variable into a shell script. I have to escape the string as there is a space in between.

sed -i -e 's#UseConcMarkSweepGC#UseConcMarkSweepGC $PROXY_ARGS#g' ${TEST_HOME}/bin/test.sh

Now this is always generating another file ith -e at the end, so I end up with test.sh and test.sh-e. Both are the same. Currently I'm doing

rm test.sh-e

right after sed which is working fine. I'm wondering if there is a way to not generate a temporary file at all? I can't remove the -e as I'm getting the error sed: -i may not be used with stdin.

OK. Then I noticed the behaviour is OS X specific, so I am closing as a duplicate where it is very well explained by chepner. — fedorqui, Jun 07 '16 at 09:57

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:34

9

This is because of the order you are placing the flags, if you are under a non-GNU sed that requires -i to have an argument:

sed -i -e '...'
#   ^^ ^^
#   |   |
#   flag|
#       |
#       value for it

Like this, sed understands -e as the extension of the backup file to create.

Instead, say:

sed -e -i '...'

Or just be explicit about the extension and set it to null, so that no backup file is created:

sed -i '' -e '...'

See more information in sed: -i may not be used with stdin on Mac OS X.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:34

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answered Jun 07 '16 at 09:43

fedorqui

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On my system I can not reproduce the behaviour unless i write `-i-e` without spaces. On what system does your answer apply? – Patrick Trentin Jun 07 '16 at 09:46
1

@PatrickTrentin I guess it is in Mac OS X. – fedorqui Jun 07 '16 at 09:56

Prevent sed from creating a temporary file

1 Answers1