Getting "sed error - illegal byte sequence" (in bash)

bash sed
alt picture alt · Jul 2, 2012 · Viewed 61.7k times · Source

Doing some stream editing to change the nasty Parallels icon. It's poorly developed and embedded into the app itself rather than being an image file. So I've located this sed command that has some good feedback:

sudo sed -i.bak s/Parallels_Desktop_Overlay_128/Parallels_Desktop_Overlay_000/g /Applications/Parallels\ Desktop.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_client_app

It returns sed: RE error: illegal byte sequence

Can anyone explain what this means? What part of the command is the problem?

Answer

ldrg picture ldrg · Jul 2, 2012

Try setting the LANG environment variable (LANG=C sed ...) or use one of the binary sed tools mentioned here: binary sed replacement

Why the error?

Without LANG=C sed assumes that files are encoded in whatever encoding is specified in LANG and the file (being binary) may contain bytes which are not valid characters in LANG's encoding (thus you could get 'illegal byte sequence').

Why does LANG=C work?

C just happens to treat all ASCII characters as themselves and non-ASCII characters as literals.

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