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Mac OS + 'cat' + 'sed' + \n = half-assed

You guys all know how Mac OS darwin does everything JUST a little differently from the *nixes. It's close enough to draw you in, and different enough to stab you in the back. Today's case sed and \n

I needed to cat some files together but I needed a newline between them. I asked my colleague Wan-Ping for a command that would do this and she suggested

cat 1.fa 2.fa 3.fa | sed 's/^>/\n>/g'

So I did this and the sucker added the character 'n' wherever I expected a newline.

It turns out that Macs are special little snow flakes and need a special little command:

cat chr*.fa | sed 's/^>/\'$'\n>/g' > hg38.fa

The magic sauce is the '$' that escapes the '\n'

Whatever.






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