Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I'm trying to use sed to process some files on Macs running OSX. Anyone know anything about Macs and sed?

Here's the problem

sed 's/^/ /g' test_file > endfile

(there are spaces betwen the second and third /, but the forum software compresses them)

This should put spaces at the beginning of every line (I'm fairly sure, tho' not positive about this). But it's only putting spaces at the beginning of the first line of a file.

Any thoughts? I've already had problems with Mac's idea of sed and the \n newline character (Mac's sed doesn't seem to recognize it). And downloading GNU's sed onto all the machines here (aobut 200) isn't an option, but we've got a lot of files to process.

Any help would be appreciated.

Best wishes,
Laurel

Not sure of MAC, anyways try this one

Code:

sed 1,$"s/^/' '/g"

Or with awk

Code:

awk '{gsub("^"," ")}'

OSX doesn't have GNU sed? That's a suprise to me, what version does it have? If it's a nonstandard version, maybye it has nonstandard flags to make it use normal linefeeds...

Use code tags for code, it'll use a monospace font and not compress the spaces. Like {code} stuff {/code} but with [ ] instead of { }.

I created a test file, and this worked fine for all lines in the document.

A few questions:
Which OS X version,
what application created your text file,
does it work on a simple* test document?

*pico mysed
this
is
a
text
file

then sed 's/^/ /g' mysed > mysed2

I copied the command you tried, from this web page, and inserted a couple more spaces, changed the file names and voila.

My guess is it will work if you use pico, or some other strictly text editor for the test document, but not for the specific text document you tested previously.
Why? Because it probably is not "strictly" a unix text document. It probably has some whacky formating code or somesuch, maybe it doesn't even have \n in it. Maybe the line endings are \r. That might cause the problem you're seeing.
There is a way to see these codes, but I don't recall the commands. Anyone?