sed command does not work with find -exec?

Question

I have this file:

file.txt:

...
threshold:
  swipe: 2
  pinch: 2 

interval:
  swipe: 2
  pinch: 2

No, if I do :

$ locate config.yml | while read i; do sed '/swipe|pinch/s/[0-9]/3/' $i; done

it will changed the 2 to 3:

 ...
    threshold:
      swipe: 3
      pinch: 3 

    interval:
      swipe: 3
      pinch: 3

but this with find does not :

sudo find / -name config.yml -exec sed -n '/swipe|pinch/s/[0-9]/3/' '{}' \+

the regex is the same, so that is not the issue, so what is?

Answer 1

In the top you reference a file name file.txt, but then only deal with files of the name config.yml, so I assume it's config.yml that contains these patterns.

The locate and bash tags are kinda misleading, as this has nothing to do with both of those :) More importantly, what kind of environment is this? On Linux systems, GNU/sed is commonly installed and needs the -E option to understand the swipe|pinch condition. Bracket expressions (the [0-9] part of your pattern) works even without -E.

So, with that being considered, the following works with GNU/sed and BSD/sed:

locate config.yml | while read -r i; do sed -E '/swipe|pinch/s/[0-9]/3/' "$i"; done

Or, with find:

find . -name config.yml -exec sed -E '/swipe|pinch/s/[0-9]/3/' '{}' +

NB: your pattern /swipe|pinch/ was correct, the suggestion to change it to escape the pipe symbol to /swipe\|pinch/ will not work as now it's no longer a regular expression and would match a literal | and thus would not match any content of your file. However, it would work if the surrounding apostrophes (') are omitted:

sed -E /swipe\|pinch/s/[0-9]/3/