Adding suffix not working with sed and awk on macOS

Question

These are the contents of t.txt

ABCDEFG
ABCDEFG
ABCDEFG
ABCDEFG

I tried these commands to add a suffix to the end of the line:

$ cat t.txt | sed -e 's/$/-asdf/'
$ cat t.txt | awk '{ print $0 "-asdf" }'

The result in macOS:

-asdfFG
-asdfFG
-asdfFG
ABCDEFG-asdf

The result in Linux:

ABCDEFG-abcd
ABCDEFG-abcd
ABCDEFG-abcd
ABCDEFG-abcd

Why do I not get the same result in macOS?

This smells like a case of `\r\n`. Use `dos2unix file` or in awk `sub(/\r/,"",$NF)` ro remove the `\r`. — James Brown, Mar 10 '17 at 11:32
try something like `cat t.txt | LC_ALL=C sed -e 's/$/-asdf/'` or `cat t.txt | sed -e 's/.*/&-asdf/'` — NeronLeVelu, Mar 10 '17 at 13:48
and a `sed 's/[[:print:]]*/&-asdf/' t.txt` to avoid a piped cat and using only printable char ? — NeronLeVelu, Mar 10 '17 at 15:35
To be 100% sure what each line contains use `head -2 file |od -t x1c` which afaik is available on mac. You can never be 100% sure that your file does not contain \r which might have been there by file creator. — George Vasiliou, Mar 10 '17 at 17:00
My bad! It has \r\n indeed. I wan't suspect that because I'm working solely on mac. Actually It was from 'torus view -e some > t.txt' — Sean, Mar 10 '17 at 22:42

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 10 '17 at 17:03

2

You have carriage returns in your file. macOS Sierra, using built-in sed on an LF-only file:

mike ~ ❱❱❱ cat t.txt
ABCDEFG
ABCDEFG
ABCDEFG
ABCDEFG
mike ~ ❱❱❱ /usr/bin/sed -e 's/$/-asdf/' t.txt
ABCDEFG-asdf
ABCDEFG-asdf
ABCDEFG-asdf
ABCDEFG-asdf

Re-saved it with CRLF:

mike ~ ❱❱❱ /usr/bin/sed -e 's/$/-asdf/' t.txt
-asdfFG
-asdfFG
-asdfFG
-asdfFG

answered Mar 10 '17 at 17:03

miken32

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Same behavior on openbsd. I think awk of mac is same as openbsd. By the way my geany editor allows me to select line endings through a menu : LF (unix) - Windows (CRLF) and Classic Mac CR. – George Vasiliou Mar 10 '17 at 19:58
Yes, macOS uses all BSD utilities, and it causes no end of confusion! That said, I get the same behaviour with CRLF files using `gsed`. – miken32 Mar 10 '17 at 20:02
I have Debian - FreeBSD (VM) and OpenBSD (VM) and all of them have available gawk in their repos. I suppose even mac has gawk. I still can not understand why most non Linux people refuse to use gnu tools when these tools are available for most of the distros out there. – George Vasiliou Mar 10 '17 at 20:07
I had to install gawk via MacPorts actually. Not built-in at all. – miken32 Mar 10 '17 at 20:09
1

Built in is only at Debian and similar Linux Distros. Not built in on BSD also. But it is just few letters away.... :-) – George Vasiliou Mar 10 '17 at 20:10

Adding suffix not working with sed and awk on macOS

1 Answers1