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rocksolid / Linux / sed in FreeBSD

Subject: sed in FreeBSD
From: Retro Guy
Newsgroups: rocksolid.shared.linux
Organization: novaBBS
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 08:58 UTC

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From: retro....@rocksolidbbs.com (Retro Guy)
Newsgroups: rocksolid.shared.linux
Subject: sed in FreeBSD
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 08:58:20 +0000
Organization: novaBBS
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Sorry, there's no bsd group so posting here :)

I needed to run sed to replace a bunch of stuff in a bunch of files, so I wrote this command:

sed -i "s/$somevariable/$MAGNET['somevariable']/g" $1

which does not work in FreeBSD. Error is 'Undefined variable', which I can understand, so I swapped around the quotes and end up with an error "Mismatched ''' ". They were not mismatched and I never did get it to work. I tried many different tweaks to the command, not always getting the same error, but always an error.

It works fine in Linux, so I ended up making the mods on a Debian box, then transferring back to FreeBSD (which worked fine). I'm curious if anyone can offer a sed command to do what's shown above that would work in FreeBSD. I'm sure it can be done just fine, but I tried and tried and finally gave up (for now), since I can do it in Linux.

And of course, after all that work, I just found the answer:

"the BSD build of sed mandates the extension for the backup file with -i, rather than it being optional, as in GNU sed"

So, this works in FreeBSD:

sed -i .bak 's/$somevariable/$MAGNET["somevariable"]/g' $1

There you have it. Answered my own question.

Retro Guy

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Subject: Re: sed in FreeBSD
From: Anonymous
Newsgroups: rocksolid.shared.linux
Organization: i2pn2 (i2pn.org)
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 09:14 UTC
References: 1

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From: pos...@anon.com (Anonymous)
Newsgroups: rocksolid.shared.linux
Subject: Re: sed in FreeBSD
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 02:14:21 -0700
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"the BSD build of sed mandates the extension for the backup file with -i, rather than it being optional, as in GNU sed"

this comes back to the question if you can/should protect a person from him/herself. GNU says no, BSD says yes....
the error messages seem to be kind of misleading though....

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Posted on def2

Subject: Re: sed in FreeBSD
From: Neodome Admin
Newsgroups: rocksolid.shared.linux
Organization: Neodome
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2020 16:09 UTC
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From: adm...@neodome.net (Neodome Admin)
Newsgroups: rocksolid.shared.linux
Subject: Re: sed in FreeBSD
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2020 16:09:42 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Neodome
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Subject	Author
sed in FreeBSD	Retro Guy
Re: sed in FreeBSD	Anonymous
Re: sed in FreeBSD	Neodome Admin