bug#13028: inplace

[Pádraig Brady]

On 11/29/2012 03:32 PM, Ruediger Meier wrote:
> On Thursday 29 November 2012, Reuben Thomas wrote:
> > On Fri, 14 May 2004 15:53:04 +0600 (YEKST), Victor Porton offered his
> > handy "inplace" script to coreutils, which runs a filter on a file
> > in-place. A couple of replies said there was no need for this as one
> > could do in-place editing with perl or sed, but I think that was
> > misguided, as the point of inplace is that it works with any filter.
> > I just used it with xml_grep:
> >
> > inplace "xml_grep --exclude 'address@hidden"toc\"]' \"\$IN\" >
> > \"\$OUT\"" "$book.xhtml"
> >
> > I attach an updated version of inplace with some bashisms and typos
> > fixed.
>
> You may also have a look at sponge from moreutils project
> http://linux.die.net/man/1/sponge
> http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

sponge is good, but doesn't quite cut it.
See point 6 at: http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/unix_file_replacement.html

thanks,
Pádraig.