Find and sed together fail in macOS

Question

This command finds files if I remove from exec onwards.

find src -name "*.tsx" -o -name "*.ts" -exec sed -i "" "s/LayerSelector/LayerRenderer/g" {} \;

The LayerSelector is indeed in most of those files, and the -i should replace in place.

However, nothing happens. No changes in files, no message.

What is wrong with this simple command ?

However, this works fine:

sed -i "" "s/LayerSelector/LayerRenderer/g" src/**/*.tsx

@stevesliva That's requited by bsd (/macOS) version of `sed` if you want to pass `-i` without a backup file extension; see ["sed in-place flag that works both on Mac (BSD) and Linux"](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5694228/sed-in-place-flag-that-works-both-on-mac-bsd-and-linux). — Gordon Davisson, Jun 15 '23 at 19:07

Timur Shtatland · Accepted Answer · 2023-06-15T19:37:39.257

You are missing parentheses around the -o clause:

find src \( -name "*.tsx" -o -name "*.ts" \) -exec sed -i "" "s/LayerSelector/LayerRenderer/g" {} \;

Without the parentheses, due to operator precedence, this:

find src -name "*.tsx" -o -name "*.ts" -exec sed -i "" "s/LayerSelector/LayerRenderer/g" {} \;

is the same as this (which is probably not what you want, because it does nothing to "*.tsx" files):

find src \( -name "*.tsx" \) -o \( -name "*.ts" -exec sed -i "" "s/LayerSelector/LayerRenderer/g" {} \; \)

See also:

1 Answers1