SED fails on MacOS in two cases : invalid repetition count(s) and bad flag in substitute command

3
votes

I am trying to create a series of cross platform SED substitutions (Linux and MacOS) . I am getting two errors on MacOS for the two SED commands below which work fine under bash in Linux. What do I need to change to get them accepted under BSD style SED?

Note: In each command below, $sed_regex_sym is replaced with -r for Linux and -E for macOS.

sed -$sed_regex_sym "/.*[*]/!{/.*[|]{1}/s/\x1B\[([0-9]{1,2}(;[0-9]{1,2})?)?[mGK]([_|\\\/])\x1B\[([0-9]{1,2}(;[0-9]{1,2})?)?[mGK]/\3/g}"

sed -$sed_regex_sym "/^([[:space:]_|\\\/]{0,$N_HASH_CHARS})[A-Z][[:space:]]/s/([A-Z][[:space:]].{1,${N_STAT_CHARS_TO_KEEP}}).*/$(printf "%${N_STAT_INDENT_CHARS}s" " ")\1/"

For two commands above, I get the following two errors respectively:

sed: 1: "/.*[*]/!{/.*[|]{1}/s/\x ...": bad flag in substitute command: '}'

sed: 1: "/^([[:space:]_|\\/]{0,  ...": RE error: invalid repetition count(s)

For the latter substitution, I did try escaping the parenthesis for the match groups as I saw on a another post but that did not resolve the invalid repetition count error.

Update 12/01/2018: I determined the source of the issues above. Going in reverse order:

1) The latter substitution was not actually a sed issue but instead, an earlier line in my script which executed wc ( word count ) to determine N_HASH_CHARS ended up with preceding spaces on macOS only. Trimming the spaces resolved the issues with the second sed command above

2) The first sed statement above was in fact a compatibility problem between BSD sed and Linux sed. I found elsewhere in stackoverflow the embedded function lists in BSD using { } need to have the internal function list end with a ;
Putting a ; just after the g for global substitution resolved the issue and works for both Linux and macOS

1
regexbashmacossedbsd
Side note: GNU sed has understood -E for quite a while. – Benjamin W.
Thanks for the note about SED, one of the Linux systems I am using it on is quite old but I will see if it supports -E – EmceeBC

1 Answers

0
votes

Copied the answer from my update above.

I determined the source of the issues above. Going in reverse order: 1) The latter substitution was not actually a sed issue but instead, an earlier line in my script which executed wc ( word count ) to determine N_HASH_CHARS ended up with preceding spaces on macOS only. Trimming the spaces resolved the issues with the second sed command above 2) The first sed statement above was in fact a compatibility problem between BSD sed and Linux sed. I found elsewhere in stackoverflow the embedded function lists in BSD using { } need to have the internal function list end with a ; Putting a ; just after the g for global substitution resolved the issue and works for both Linux and macOS