permission denied when sed in place edit in mingw

Question

I'm using mingw.

  $ sed -i "s/a/b/" test.txt
  sed: preserving permissions for `./sed003480': Permission denied

I can touch/rm files in current dir.

I'm having the same issue. Seems like a duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/q/12850882/911550 - different platform though. — parvus, Jan 17 '13 at 10:51

score 45 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 27 '15 at 10:25

45

It's caused by Windows security settings.

Open the folder's Properties settings from the context menu. In the Security tab, click Edit, press Add... in the pop-up window and add your user to the list, check Full Control in the Allow column. Press OK twice to apply the changes.

edited Aug 27 '15 at 10:25

FRob

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answered Jan 19 '13 at 03:57

peon

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Perhaps in English Windows it is called "Full Control". – Qwertie Jul 07 '14 at 05:54
1

@Jacob - I had this too. The fix for me was to use git bash that's comes with https://git-scm.com/download/win instead of mingw that comes with sourcetree. The git one is 64bit whereas sourcetrees was 32 bit, not sure if that is the only difference. – elRobbo Jun 20 '16 at 04:29
Using 64 bit Git Bash worked for me as well on Windows 7 – codehearts Apr 09 '18 at 23:45

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 15 '17 at 08:56

7

For me, folder was read only. unchecking readonly option fix my problem. Thanks to Zenadix commment

answered Feb 15 '17 at 08:56

Tapash

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 19 '19 at 20:27

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On Windows 10 WSL i got similar issue. The issue was caused by VS code being open and apparently using the file. Closing VS code solved my issue.

answered Jun 19 '19 at 20:27

Andreas Broström

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 24 '19 at 12:20

TL;DR: Used sudo

In my case, I was running a bash script running on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as follows:

./generate.sh

The script created a bunch of files however, for reasons unknown, sed was denied permission to modify the permissions on these files for some reason:

The actual sed command was used to perform a search-replace that looked a bit like this:

grep -rl $PATTERN $PUBLIC_API_FOLDER/ \
    | xargs sed -i 's/$PATTERN/$REPLACE/g'

As you can see, despite not having elevated priviledges at any point, I nevertheless was unable to modify the files the script created:

sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/models/sedt0qk4D’: Operation not permitted
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/models/sedOxoc1O’: Operation not permitted
sed: cannot rename public_api/models/sedOxoc1O: Permission denied
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/controllers/sedx5BafW’: Operation not permitted
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/models/sedVkdqzc’: Operation not permitted
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/models/sedLvyS3s’: Operation not permitted
sed: cannot rename public_api/models/sedLvyS3s: Permission denied
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/controllers/sedE7GSe8’: Operation not permitted
sed: cannot rename public_api/controllers/sedE7GSe8: Permission denied
sed: preserving permissions for ‘public_api/controllers/sednHZBQf’: Operation not permitted
sed: cannot rename public_api/controllers/sednHZBQf: Permission denied

The solution in my case was to simply run the script with sudo.

sudo ./generate.sh

permission denied when sed in place edit in mingw

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