Rubenerd

I’m writing this on a plane to Japan for AsiaBSDCon again! I learned last year that NetBSD has a unique place there, and I’ve been keen to continue exploring it. My challenge for this year is to have NetBSD on par with FreeBSD on OrionVM, including full contextualisation. But I digress.

tl;dr Use NetBSD sed the same as GNU sed, not FreeBSD sed, for inline subtitution. You probably don’t want or need to know more, but consider the rest a bonus.

Comparing with GNU and FreeBSD sed

sed offers one of the most commonly encountered differences between the BSD and GNU toolchains. On Linux you can substitute a line in a file like this:

$ sed -i 's/Old/New/' $FILE

But this doesn’t behave the same on FreeBSD, and by extension, macOS:

==> sed: 1: "$FILE": invalid command code

The reason is FreeBSD sed requires an extension for -i, as per the manpage(1):

-i extension
    Edit files in-place, saving backups with the specified extension.

So what you really want to do is this. Note the empty string after -i:

$ sed -i '' 's/Old/New/' $FILE

NetBSD sed

Like a schmuck, I assumed the same applied on NetBSD. If you do enough web searches, you get frustrated quickly that people assume all the BSDs are functionally equivilent. But when I used the FreeBSD syntax above, I got:

==> sed: s/Old/New/: No such file or directory

Not to get all Malcolm Gladwell on you, but turns out NetBSD behaves like GNU in this case, and using -i is sufficient:

$ sed -i 's/Old/New/' $FILE