Error when using find and sed

Question

I am trying to use the find and sed commands in Linux to do the following:

When command is issued in current directory it will edit all ".cbf" files in all directories and sub-directories.

I have been using: this, this and this as research references.

My current command that is not working is:

find . -name "*.cbf" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/# change the header/# change the header to something/g'

The error I get is: sed: can't read : No such file or directory

I have tried the command both above the directory with the .cbf files and actually in the directory.

Can someone please help me with what I am doing wrong. I simply wish to edit a line in all .cbf files in subdirectories from where I am sitting.

Thanks in advance

Why don't you try like this stackoverflow.com/a/6759339/3297613 ? — Avinash Raj
– Avinash Raj, Commented Oct 5, 2014 at 7:15

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-05 07:17:35Z

2

Try this find/sed command:

find . -name "*.cbf" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} sed -i.bak 's/# change the header/# change the header to something/g' {}

answered Oct 5, 2014 at 7:17

anubhava

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2 Comments

JJcarter Over a year ago

This seems to work too, but same error with : File name too long. Again the files I have are as such "cal_50_01_0001.cbf"

anubhava Over a year ago

That is not really very long. Try quoting '{}' as in: find . -name "*.cbf" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} sed -i.bak 's/# change the header/# change the header to something/g' '{}'

afenster · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-05 07:21:04Z

2

Your command actually works. The error you see is related to -i '' part which seems wrong. The option to -i should be used to provide a suffix for backups when doing an in-place edit, and should be given without any space: -i.bak.

If you don't need backups at all, just don't give any extra option after -i. In your case sed is thinking that extra '' is a filename and is actually trying to open it (quote from strace output):

4000  open("", O_RDONLY)                = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

So, the correct command should not have '' after -i.

answered Oct 5, 2014 at 7:21

afenster

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3 Comments

JJcarter Over a year ago

So I tried this and I no longer get an error, however once the command is issued is hangs up. It seems like it is working, however I do not see any .cbf files edited.

afenster Over a year ago

If there are a lot of files there, find will take time. You could run just the find part, without -print0, to see how long it takes. It goes through all the files from the current directory, recursively.

JJcarter Over a year ago

when I issue without print0 it shows all my files very quick then at the end has : File name too long. Any ideas? my file name is cal_51_09_0627.cbf. Should I have a flag to allow this length?

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