The Unix sed command doesn't recognize a backslash escaped n \n as a newline character. For instance, the command sed "s!,!\n!g" is replacing commas in the input text with the letter n and not a newline character.
How can I make sed interpret \n as a newline character?
If you are using bash, you can insert the newline character by hitting the enter key as
sed 's!,!\
!g'
sed "s/,/\n/g" works here, in bash
You may need to escape it with a second \
sed 's!,!\\n!g'
You may also need to replace out some white space, depending on what you are looking to do.
in my tests as well sed took issue to using "'s instead of ''s
The Mac version of sed has this difficulty. Try installing the GNU version of sed with brew install coreutils and then
gsed "s/,/\\n/g"
should work. Alternatively, tr ',' \\n should work if the search string is only a single character.
Indeed Unix Echo + Sed not always process \n as new line character. I've solved it by providing carriage return ASCII 0xd with vertical tab ASCII 0xb instead.
For example add new line character with sed command using variable:
eol="\xd\xb"
echo -e "hello" | sed "s/$/$eol/"
