Lingua Franca - Error on Task 16 (sed)

[tapizin]

I used the proper code given in the solutions:

sed -i ‘s/Lingua-Franca/Lingua Franca/g’ */ *.txt

however my Terminal returns the following:

sed: 1: “africa/afrihili.txt”: command a expects \ followed by text

Anyone can help? I’m using zsh for Mac

https://www.codecademy.com/courses/learn-the-command-line/articles/command-line-offline-project

[tgrtim]

This issue has cropped up before, see the following thread(s) for a little discussion and some potential solutions-

Lingua Franca - step 16

Hi all. Step 16 doesn’t seem to work for me on MacOS. Information I found online seems inconclusive but the fault seems to be MacOS specific. Any idea what causes the problem here? Thanks lingua-franca👽$ sed -i 's/Lingua-Franca/Lingua Franca/g' */*.txt sed: 1: "africa/afrihili.txt": command a expects \ followed by text lingua-franca👽$ grep -Rl 'Lingua-Franca' */*.txt | wc -l 6 lingua-franca👽$ Edit The following version worked. I skipped -i and it worked. sed 's/Lingua-Franca/Lingua…

Quirk running Sed on Mac

Hi all, I ran into a problem during Lingua Franca. the sed command returned an error invalid command W. Searching for an answer brought me to this If you are on a OS X, this probably has nothing to do with the sed command. On the OSX version of sed , the -i option expects an extension argument so your command is actually parsed as the extension argument and the file path is interpreted as the command code. Try adding the -e argument explicitly and giving '' as argument to -i : sed -i '' -e "…

The instructions appear to be written for a GNU version of sed whereas the mac is using a BSD version. If you’re uncertain about the sed command on a given system then man sed may help.

[toastedpitabread]

It’s a good heads up for working with linux/unix. Different versions can give subtle but big differences (like for example, the default python3 version that installs when you’re setting things up). These are definitely things I wish I realized earlier…

[bytecoder77340]

Adding the -e argument worked on newer MacOS

sed -i’Lingua-Franca’ -e ‘s/Lingua-Franca/Lingua Franca/g’ /.txt

[theojfp]

Could you please explain why you inserted ‘Lingua-Franca’ after the -i?
And what does the -e do?

[toastedpitabread]

Whenever you are on the command-line you can type man [command] to read the manual about whatever command you’re curious about.

For example here you can type man sed and read what the flags do. Specifically for -e:

 -e command
         Append the editing commands specified by the command argument
         to the list of commands.

From this you can see that what follows -e has to be a command. In this case it is s/Lingua-Franca/Lingua Franca/g (which is a type of search command).

[net7464548007]

This did not work for me on macOS 10.13.06(tried copy pasting).

Tried adding space right after “-i” command, did not work.

Zero-length extension as found in “man sed” did not work too.

Changing the file path and using wildcard “/.txt” did not work and solutions on stack overflow did not help too.

[oscarcunningham]

Wasn’t working for me so followed this:

'sed -i' syntax not working for Terminal

Basically the format on MacOS is: sed -i ‘[extension]’ ‘s/Lingua-Franca/Lingua Franca/g’ wildcard/wildcard.txt

[extension] will be what it is saved as as a backup i believe (talks about it in the link).
But can leave it blank and just put ’ ’ if you don’t want one i think? (I’m really new to all this, but it worked for me!)

so I used: sed -i ‘’ ‘s/Lingua-Franca/Lingua Franca/g’ wildcard/wildcard.txt

(wildcard = asterisk)