SED command error on MACOS X

Question

I am trying to run this command on MacOSX terminal , which was initially intended to run on Linux

sed '1 i VISPATH=/mnt/local/gdrive/public/3DVis' init.txt >> ~/.bash_profile 

but it gives me the error:

command i expects \ followed by text.  

is there any way I could modify the above command to work on MacOSX terminal

Answer 1

Shelter is right but there's another way to do it. You can use the bash $'...' quoting to interpret the escapes before passing the string to sed.

So:

         sed -iold '1i\'$'\n''text to prepend'$'\n' file.txt                       ^^^^^^^^                     ^                      / |\|||/ \                    |__ No need to reopen                      | | \|/  |                          string to sed      Tells sed to    | |  |   |     escape the next _/ |  |   +-----------------------------+          char          |  +-------------+                   |                        |                |                   |                   Close string   The  special bash   Reopen string to                      to sed       newline char to      send to sed                                     send to sed 

This answer on unix.stackexchange.com led me to this solution.