sed replacement command not working on Mac

Question

I'm trying to replace some text in a CMakelists.txt file with the value of a bash variable using sed, but I'm getting an error:

sed: 1: "'s/iPhone": invalid command code ?

sed command:

sed -i "" 's/iPhone Developer/'$PROVPROF'/g' CMakelists.txt

PROVPROF will always have something with this format:

iPhone Developer: Firstname Lastname (Numbers/Letters)

Answer 1

The reason this doesn't work is because sed on linux is different that sed on mac. In order for your commands to work as intended, I recommend installing gnu-sed through homebrew.

You can do this via: brew install gnu-sed --with-default-names

NOTE: --with-default-names flag will attempt to symlink gnu-sed with your sed, should be what you want but if not, I warned you!

then run hash -r on bash, or rehash on zsh.

If it does not work after that, you must manually symlink gnu-sed with sed via:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/gsed $(which sed)

Answer 2

If you have characters in your variable which are the same as the delimiter you used to s, try using another delimiter instead:

sed -i '' "s|iPhone Developer|$PROVPROF|g" CMakelists.txt

Something more rare:

sed -i '' $'s\xFFiPhone Developer\xFF'"$PROVPROF"$'\xFFg' CMakelists.txt

Update:

Also, don't try to store your arguments on a variable. Word splitting would not always work the way you do. This is wrong:

command="sed -i '' 's|iPhone Developer|$PROVPROF|g' CMakelists.txt"
$command

Error message like sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `'' would appear. On other seds the message may be different.

But you can use an array:

command=(sed -i '' "s|iPhone Developer|$PROVPROF|g" CMakelists.txt)
"${command[@]}"

It's still not commendable though. If you can run it directly, run it directly.