Newlines in sed on Mac

Posted on December 5, 2010 by

Moved to new blog: http://nlfiedler.github.io/2010/12/05/newlines-in-sed-on-mac.html

Advertisements
This entry was posted in Computing, HowTo and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

12 Responses to Newlines in sed on Mac

  1. iveney says:
    July 5, 2011 at 10:14 pm

    Damn it… I encounter this problem too. This is so hard to understand.

  2. Pingback: links for 2011-07-06 « Use You Imagination

  3. Anon A. Mous says:
    July 13, 2011 at 11:11 pm

    I’m having this problem on OsX 10.6 not just with sed but with bash in general. No matter how I try to get a script to output a newline, all it does is print \n.

  4. cbrinker says:
    September 9, 2011 at 3:04 pm

    The issue here is not with OSX per-se as it is with the default version of sed you get with OSX.

    /usr/bin/sed is the BSD version from May 10, 2005

    Optionally, you can install gnu sed or gsed via ports (currently 4.2.1 from June 2009) that behaves as you are accustomed to on linux.

    $ echo “a b c d” | gsed ‘s/ /\n/g’
    a
    b
    c
    d

  6. Pingback: You see, yesterday I referred to some work I had to do for university. That wasn’t quite true. - GhostLyrics' Journal

  7. Gordon says:
    May 30, 2012 at 3:49 am

    There’s an interesting discussion in superuser about this if it helps. It can be done it seems, it just requires you to get bash to do the escaping: http://superuser.com/questions/307165/newlines-in-sed-on-mac-os-x

    These work:
    echo ‘foo bar’ | sed $’s/ /\\\n/g’
    nl=$’\n’; echo ‘foo bar’ | sed “s/ /\\$nl/g”

    Or you can use: tr ‘ ‘ ‘\n’

  8. SC says:
    April 28, 2013 at 6:09 pm

    You are awesome. Thanks!

  9. Glen says:
    July 3, 2013 at 1:32 am

    Yes, this is a pain! I came across your blog when searching to solve the same problem. BTW, the following also works on OS X (the ‘y’ function does a global replace, and allows you to use \n as a replacement string):

    echo ‘foo bar baz quux’ | sed “y/ /\n/”

  10. Joe says:
    December 10, 2013 at 3:07 pm

    This worked for me to replace the Mac OSX csv line feeds with standard ones. Allowed me to import the .csv file I created from mac excel to mySQL.
    awk ‘{gsub(“\r”, “\n”); print $0;}’ file1.csv > file2.csv

  11. Xiao says:
    April 15, 2014 at 4:09 pm

    If all your sed usage tends to be substitution expressions (as mine tends to be), you can also use perl

    $ echo ‘foo bar baz quux’ | perl -pe ‘s/ /\n/g’
    foo
    bar
    baz
    quux

  12. Юрий Пухальский says:
    July 10, 2014 at 1:48 pm

    Why not use the standard POSIX way? Escaped newline?

    echo “a b c” | sed ‘s/ /\
    /g’

Comments are closed.