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References: <201112221539.pBMFdlaj011933@penguin.research.att.com>
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Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 01:14:03 +0100
Message-ID: <CAO-BiTJXqLgMJSxoow8HTurLEGDk84x0=jv=UJJJZwByY_nTmA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: '>;' redirection operator [was: [1003.1(2008)/Issue 7 0000530]:
 Support in-place editing in sed (-iEXTENSION)]
From: Geir Hauge <geir.hauge@gmail.com>
To: Bruce Korb <bkorb@gnu.org>
Cc: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>, David Korn <dgk@research.att.com>, dash <dash@vger.kernel.org>, 
	austin-group-l@opengroup.org, zsh-workers@zsh.org, 
	Bash - Bug <bug-bash@gnu.org>, miros-discuss@mirbsd.org
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2011/12/22 Bruce Korb <bkorb@gnu.org>
>
> When the exact opposite is the useful variation?  I.e. keep-on-failure.
> "-i" for sed is simple, understandable and implemented a lot.
>

As far as I know, -i is only implemented with GNU sed and BSD sed, and they
are incompatible, BSD sed's -i takes a mandatory argument, while GNU sed's
-i takes an optional string which must be provided in the same argument.
E.g.

gnused -i.bak sed-script file
bsdsed -i .bak sed-script file

So the only portable way of using sed to "edit" (read: overwrite) a file is
with

sed sed-script file > file.tmp && mv file.tmp file

I'd welcome this >; syntax.

-- 
Geir Hauge

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