What is wrong with this call to sed -i?

Question

I have this line

find . -type f \( ! -name '*.plist' \) -and \( ! -name '*.mp4' \) -and \( ! -name '.DS*' \) -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/AAA/BBB/g'

my intention is from the current directory recursively change all occurrences of AAA to BBB in all files except those with the following extensions: .plist, .mp4 and .DS*

but I get the message

sed: 1: "./myDir/pro ...": invalid command code .

Answer 1

The easiest solution is to use this:

find . -type f \( ! -name '*.plist' \) -and \( ! -name '*.mp4' \) -and \( ! -name '.DS*' \) -print0 | xargs -0 perl -pi -w -e  's/AAA/BBB/g'

Answer 2

Unlike GNU sed, the sed that ships with Mac OSX requires an argument to the -i option, specifying the backup suffix; to suppress the backup you have to pass an empty string (''). Therefore, sed was interpreting your s/AAA/BBB/ as the backup suffix and taking your fist file name (./myDir/pro ...) as the command to execute. Of course, . is not a valid sed command, causing the error. Keeping that in mind, the following will work:

find [...] | xargs -0 sed -i.bak 's/AAA/BBB/g'

Or, if you insist on suppressing the backup

find [...] | xargs -0 sed -i '' 's/AAA/BBB/g'