sed command creating unwanted duplicates of file with -e extension

Question

I am trying to do a recursive find and replace on java files in a directory using a shell script. It works, but it is hiding all the files, and creating duplicates with a -e extension

#!/bin/bash for file in $(find . -type f -name "*.java") do sed -i -e 's/foo/bar/g' $file done 

From my understanding, the -e is optional - but if I do not provide it I get the following error on every file it finds

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

Any clue as it what is happening here? For reference I am on Mac OS X running El Capitan

Here is a before and after screenshot of the directory after running the script. The replaced files still exist, they are hidden?

Answer 1

On OSX sed (BSD) sed requires an extension after -i option. Since it is finding -e afterwards it is adding -e to each input filename. btw you don't even need -e option here.

You can pass an empty extension like this:

sed -i '' 's/foo/bar/g' $file 

Or use .bak for an extension to save original file:

sed -i.bak 's/foo/bar/g' $file 

Answer 2

The accepted answer works for OSX but causes issues if your code is run on both GNU and OSX systems since they expect -i[SUFFIX] and -i [SUFFIX] respectively.

There are probably two reasonable solutions in this case.

1. Don't use -i (inplace). Instead pipe to a temporary file and overwrite the original after.
2. use perl.

The easiest fix for this I found was to simply use perl. The syntax is almost identical:

sed -i -e 's/foo/bar/g' $file

->

perl -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g' $file