OS X sed does not recognize \t as TAB character
Mar 07, 2014Say you would like to replace multiple spaces with a tab (\t
) in file with:
sed -i 's/ \+ /\t/g' file
On Linux it works fine. However, on Mac OS X, sed will not give what you want.
The reason is that Mac OS X sed does not understand “\t”. You have to literally enter the tab by pressing Ctrl + v
followed by Tab
.
Also you need to explicitly give an empty string as the extension to edit in place.
Moreover, Mac OS X sed needs -E
to recognize extended regular expressions. In this case, more than one spaces is the pattern ` + . Note that you do not have to escape
+`.
With all the above changes, you’ll have to write:
sed -i '' -E 's/ + / /g' file
It is a pain to take care of so many differences between Mac OS X sed and the GNU sed. You can install GNU core utilities and leave all the differences out of your mind:
Install homebrew if you haven’t done so years ago already:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"
Then:
brew install coreutils findutils gnu-tar gnu-sed gawk gnutls gnu-indent gnu-getopt
This will install GNU find, sed, awk with a g-prefix. So now
gsed -i 's/ \+ /\t/g' file
will do exactly what you want.
If you absolutely need the GNU sed without the g-prefix, you can
brew install gnu-sed --default-names
Bonus:
What if you want to run a script that calls sed on both Linux and OS X? You can do the following: