Question

Im trying to find and replace all “^A” characters with a “\t” so that I can import the data into a mysql database. The command Im using on OSX is:

sed -i '' 's/^A/\t/' item_info_20130203 > item_info_20130203_tab

This just deletes all the contents in the file. Where am I going wrong?

Answer 1

The command should actually be something like this:

sed 's/'`echo "\001"`'/\t/g' item_info_20130203 > item_info_20130203_tab

or the more modern way

sed 's/'$(echo "\001")'/\t/g' item_info_20130203 > item_info_20130203_tab

or to affect the original file:

sed -i 's/'`echo "\001"`'/\t/g' item_info_20130203

If you are using GNU sed, you can use this:

sed -i 's/\x01/\t/g' item_info_20130203