RE: sed error when called with -i option

[Koppert, Zachery]

Thank you Bob. I have taken your advice of building a newer version of sed. 
That did correct the issue. Thanks again for your time.

Zachery Koppert  |  Software Design Engineer  |  Phone: 503.627.6938  |   
www.tektronix.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Proulx [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2014 11:12 PM
To: Koppert, Zachery
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: sed error when called with -i option

Koppert, Zachery wrote:
> sed: invalid option -- i

It appears you have a very old version of sed on your target system.
You will likely need to update to a newer version that supports the -i option 
in order to get your installation script to work.

What version of sed are you using?  Use --version to report it.

  sed --version

It seems you have run into a problem trying to port software developed to run 
on one system over to a different system.  The two systems not being the same 
you have run into a classic operating system porting problem.  This is the way 
it always used to be in the old days.  POSIX has helped a lot.  But for example 
the -i option is not a POSIX standardized feature.  This is not a bug in sed.  
The install script is simply trying to use a feature that appears in newer GNU 
sed but does not exist on your system which has an older GNU sed.

It looks like you are using an ARM system.  Is that right?  (Which is awesome 
by the way.)  What is the origination of the operating system?
A software distribution?  Or a self compiled collection?  I can imagine that 
whoever provided the system may need to update at least some of the components 
of it.  Given your email address I can imagine the environment and when I 
worked in a similar environment I often needed to compile my own updated 
versions of system software.  You might want to compile a newer sed for that 
system.

Alternatively the installation script you are using may need to avoid using 
features that are not available on your older software platform.

If neither are possible then you could modify the script to avoid the -i 
option.  I often needed to modify installation scripts in order to port them to 
a different system.

Bob