CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashreplacesed
JJcarter
JJcarter

Reputation: 53

Error when using find and sed

I am trying to use the find and sed commands in Linux to do the following:

  1. When command is issued in current directory it will edit all ".cbf" files in all directories and sub-directories.

I have been using: this, this and this as research references.

My current command that is not working is:

find . -name "*.cbf" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/# change the header/# change the header to something/g'

The error I get is: sed: can't read : No such file or directory

I have tried the command both above the directory with the .cbf files and actually in the directory.

Can someone please help me with what I am doing wrong. I simply wish to edit a line in all .cbf files in subdirectories from where I am sitting.

Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 1

Views: 403

Answers (2)

afenster
afenster

Reputation: 3608

Your command actually works. The error you see is related to -i '' part which seems wrong. The option to -i should be used to provide a suffix for backups when doing an in-place edit, and should be given without any space: -i.bak.

If you don't need backups at all, just don't give any extra option after -i. In your case sed is thinking that extra '' is a filename and is actually trying to open it (quote from strace output):

4000  open("", O_RDONLY)                = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

So, the correct command should not have '' after -i.

Upvotes: 2

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 784888

Try this find/sed command:

find . -name "*.cbf" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} sed -i.bak 's/# change the header/# change the header to something/g' {}

Upvotes: 2

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