Getting "sed error - illegal byte sequence" (in bash)
BashSedBash Problem Overview
Doing some stream editing to change the nasty Parallels icon. It's poorly developed and embedded into the app itself rather than being an image file. So I've located this sed command that has some good feedback:
sudo sed -i.bak s/Parallels_Desktop_Overlay_128/Parallels_Desktop_Overlay_000/g /Applications/Parallels\ Desktop.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_client_app
It returns sed: RE error: illegal byte sequence
Can anyone explain what this means? What part of the command is the problem?
Bash Solutions
Solution 1 - Bash
Try setting the LANG environment variable (LANG=C sed ...) or use one of the binary sed tools mentioned here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2604964/binary-sed-replacement
Why the error?
Without LANG=C sed assumes that files are encoded in whatever encoding is specified in LANG and the file (being binary) may contain bytes which are not valid characters in LANG's encoding (thus you could get 'illegal byte sequence').
Why does LANG=C work?
C just happens to treat all ASCII characters as themselves and non-ASCII characters as literals.
Solution 2 - Bash
LANG=C alone didn't do the trick for me but adding LC_CTYPE=C as well solved it.
Solution 3 - Bash
In addition to LANG=C and LC_CTYPE=C, I had to do LC_ALL=C to get this to work.
LC_ALL overrides all individual LC_* categories. Thus, the most robust approach is to use LC_ALL=C sed ... - no need to also deal with the other variables.
Solution 4 - Bash
I managed to do it by running:
unset LANG
before the sed command.
Not sure what I've done or why it works but it did.