Replace comma with newline in sed on MacOS?

Question

I have a file of id\'s that are comma separated. I\'m trying to replace the commas with a new line. I\'ve tried:

sed \'s/,/\\n/g\' file

b

Answer 1

This works on MacOS Mountain Lion (10.8), Solaris 10 (SunOS 5.10) and RHE Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3, Tikanga)...

$ sed 's/{pattern}/\^J/g' foo.txt > foo2.txt

... where the ^J is done by doing ctrl+v+j. Do mind the \ before the ^J.

PS, I know the sed in RHEL is GNU, the MacOS sed is FreeBSD based, and although I'm not sure about the Solaris sed, I believe this will work pretty much with any sed. YMMV tho'...

Answer 2

To make it complete, this also works:

echo "a,b" | sed "s/,/\\$(echo -e '\n\r')/"

Answer 3

sed on macOS Mojave was released in 2005, so one solution is to install the gnu-sed,

brew install gnu-sed

then use gsed will do as you wish,

gsed 's/,/\n/g' file

If you prefer sed, just sudo sh -c 'echo /usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin > /etc/paths.d/brew', which is suggested by brew info gnu-sed. Restart your term, then your sed in command line is gsed.

Answer 4

$ echo $PATH | sed -e $'s/:/\\\n/g' 
/usr/local/sbin
/Library/Oracle/instantclient_11_2/sdk
/usr/local/bin

...

Works for me on Mojave

Answer 5

Though I am late to this post, just updating my findings. This answer is only for Mac OS X.

$ sed 's/new/
> /g' m1.json > m2.json
sed: 1: "s/new/
/g": unescaped newline inside substitute pattern

In the above command I tried with Shift+Enter to add new line which didn't work. So this time I tried with "escaping" the "unescaped newline" as told by the error.

$ sed 's/new/\
> /g' m1.json > m2.json 

Worked! (in Mac OS X 10.9.3)

Answer 6

Apparently \r is the key!

$ sed 's/, /\r/g' file3.txt > file4.txt

Transformed this:

ABFS, AIRM, AMED, BOSC, CALI, ECPG, FRGI, GERN, GTIV, HSON, IQNT, JRCC, LTRE,
MACK, MIDD, NKTR, NPSP, PME, PTIX, REFR, RSOL, UBNT, UPI, YONG, ZEUS

To this:

ABFS
AIRM
AMED
BOSC
CALI
ECPG
FRGI
GERN
GTIV
HSON
IQNT
JRCC
LTRE
MACK
MIDD
NKTR
NPSP
PME
PTIX
REFR
RSOL
UBNT
UPI
YONG
ZEUS