mjhjmtu

This works perfectly well on any Linux :

$ echo foo bar | sed -n '/foo//bar/;p;'
foo bar

But fails on OSXs ancient BSD variant :

❯ echo foo bar | sed -n '/foo//bar/;p;' 
sed: 1: "/foo//bar/;p;": extra characters at the end of } command

Am I missing some magical incantation?
Is there a way to write this in a portable manner ?

I'd hate to have to revert to a pipeline of grep | grep | grep commands.

Update : low rep here so can't upvote but thanks all repliers for your well considered advice.

A sed editing command should be terminated by ; or a literal newline. GNU sed is very forgiving about this.

Your script:

/foo//bar/;p;

Expanded:

/foo/
 /bar/
 p
 

This would work as a sed script fed to sed through -f.

If we make sure to replace newlines with ; (only needed at the end of commands and ... groups of commands) so that we can use it on the command line, we get

/foo//bar/p;;

This works with OpenBSD sed (the original did not, due to that second ; missing).

In this particular case, this may be further simplified to

/foo//bar/p;

This appears to work on BSD sed:

$ echo -e "foo barnfoonbar" | sed -n '/foo//bar/p;'
foo bar

As does two layers of nesting:

$ echo -e "foo barnfoonbar" | sed -n '/foo//bar/p;;'
foo bar