sed "undefined label" on MacOS

Question

I recently found out that this simple sed expression work fine on Linux or under Cygwin but fails on Mac with an "undefined label" error:

$ sed '/SUCCESSFUL/d ; /\[java\]/!b label; s/\s\+\[java\]//; /^\s*$$/d; /Compiling/!d; :label /^\s*$$/d; s/^/monitor: /'
sed: 1: "/SUCCESSFUL/d ; /\[java ...": undefined label 'label; s/\s\+\[java\]//; /^\s*$$/d; /Compiling/!d; :label /^\s*$$/d; s/^/monitor: /'

sed on MacOS is a BSD variant with different options than the GNU counterpart. However man sed clearly indicates the MacOS version of sed supports labels, so why this error, and most important how to solve it?

Answer 1

A quick fix for others with similar problems (on MacOS) might be:

prepend your string expression with an empty string: ''

For example: instead of

sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' text.txt

write:

sed -i '' 's/foo/bar/g' text.txt