Why the command used to remove BOM doesn't work?

Question

I found a command to find documents in my all-level folders and directories that are utf-8 with BOM and then remove the BOM . But it doesn't seem to work on my computer(osx)...Should I install moodle on my machine first in order to run it in my command line?

Below is the command:

find . -type f -exec sed 's/^\\xEF\\xBB\\xBF//' -i.bak {} \\; -exec rm {}.bak \\;

The result I got is sed: -i.bak: No such file or directory and all the content in the files, which seems very weird.

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

The command you found was for GNU's sed, which supports optional arguments anywhere. Worst of all, OS X's sed doesn't seem to support non-ASCII byte sequences.

Instead, for OS X use the following answer, which uses Perl: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9101056/1554386

Tying it into find is as follows:

find . -type f -exec perl -e 's/\xef\xbb\xbf//;' -pi.bak {} \;

You can add the -exec rm {}.bak \\; from your command if you wish, but you can just as easily do that separately