Multiple replacements with one sed command

user1026361 picture user1026361 · Oct 25, 2013 · Viewed 30.6k times · Source

I'm wondering how I can do a multiple find/replace using a single sed statment in Mac OSX. I'm able to do this in Ubuntu but because of the BSD nature of OSX, the command must be slightly altered.

So, given a file with the string:

"Red Blue Red Blue Black Blue Red Blue Red"

I want to run a sed statement that results in the output:

"Green Yellow Green Yellow Black Yellow Green Yellow Green"

My two sed statements with a qualifying find

color1="Green"  
color2="Yellow"  
find . -type f -exec sed -i '' s/Red/$color1/g {} \;  
find . -type f -exec sed -i '' s/Blue/$color2/g {} \;  

I've tried several combinations of semicolons and slashes, and looked at Apple's Dev man page for sed but with a lack of examples, I couldn't piece it together.

Answer

Lars Brinkhoff picture Lars Brinkhoff · Oct 25, 2013

Apple's man page says Multiple commands may be specified by using the -e or -f options. So I'd say

find . -type f -exec sed -i '' -e s/Red/$color1/g -e s/Blue/$color2/g {} \;

This certainly works in Linux and other Unices.