[ale] sed

[James P. Kinney III]

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 22:39 -0400, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 22:34 -0400, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 21:51 -0400, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 21:44 -0400, Jamey Owens wrote:
> > > > One note of caution.  It can be pretty dangerous to try and use the same 
> > > > file for input and output.  Lots of shells will leave you with a totally 
> > > > empty file using the previous sed command with input & output being equal.
> > > 
> > > most recent versions of sed support the -i param which allows for
> > > inplace (same file) editing/changes.   man sed. ;-)
> > 
> > so the following _should_ work:
> > 
> > sed -i 's/abc/xyz/g' <file >file
> > 
> > BUT ?!?!? it leaves a 0 length file behind.
> 
> as it should.   You need to do this:
> 
> sed -i -e 's/abc/xyz/g' <file >file

That also dumps the file contents.
> 
> ;-)
> 
> -Jim P.
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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