Replace command 'sed' when porting to Mac OSX

[joe.pelayo]

Hello everybody.

To start with I am not sure if this is posted in the right section (might as well fit in programming). Being said that I'll present my problem.

As a part of a bigger program (which is basically a bunch of Fortran routines and bash scripts) I added the instruction (found the suggestion in a forum):

sed -i '1d' textfile

which removes the first line of the textfile and saves changes in the same file. I did this in my Fedora powered laptop and worked like a charm. The problem is that I need to temporarily move the development of the program to a Mac, and after installing all necessary software (gnuplot and such) the program fails at the point where the sed instruction is called. After checking its help page (in OSX) I found a paragraph that 'confirmed my fears':

STANDARDS
     The sed utility is expected to be a superset of the IEEE Std 1003.2
     (``POSIX.2'') specification.

     The -E, -a and -i options are non-standard FreeBSD extensions and may not
     be available on other operating systems.

from what I understand the sed instruction is not standard between Linux and BSD (OSX), right?

Being that the case I consider the safest thing to do is to find an alternative way of removing the first line of my file (something that works in both *nixes).

Is there an alternate method of removing the first line of a file with bash?

Thanks,
Joe.

[Dies]

Somebody probably has a proper answer, but I like to take the lazy way out so I would just do

cat textfile | sed '1d' > textfile

Though you might want to make a temporary copy to use as input then delete it.

[joe.pelayo]

Originally Posted by Dies

Somebody probably has a proper answer, but I like to take the lazy way out so I would just do

cat textfile | sed '1d' > textfile

Though you might want to make a temporary copy to use as input then delete it.

Thanks for your reply Dies.

I just figured out a solution for the problem by dropping the -i parameter and directing the input of the command like

sed 1d textfile > anothertextfile

After that I just renamed the file back to its former name. Works in both platforms

Thanks,
Joe.