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bug#32069: Man page description is wrong for -i
From: |
Assaf Gordon |
Subject: |
bug#32069: Man page description is wrong for -i |
Date: |
Fri, 6 Jul 2018 15:43:01 -0600 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.8.0 |
Hello,
On 06/07/18 02:54 PM, Matthew Jenkins wrote:
I'm not asking to change the behavior of sed. I'm asking to have the
man page reflect what sed -i actually does to at least be less wrong
so it's less of a gotcha.
Examples of gotchas:
sed -i on a large file when you only have less than that amount of
space available.
sed -i on a hard link
when out of disk space, 'sed -i' behaves in a very reasonable and safe way:
it will fail to create the temporary file, and leave the original file
unmodified.
As for 'sed -i' on hard-link:
"sed -i" has never maintained hard-links with "--in-place",
and neither does any other common unix utility - so it is not clear
where this expectation originates from.
I'm sure there are more but these gotchas wouldn't be gotchas anymore
with a better description.
"sed -i" certainly has some gotchas, and few are documented in the manual:
https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html#index-_002df
It seems the "in-place" related topics are growing, perhaps it is
warranted to dedicated a separate section in the manual.
If you'd like to try and add such a section - please do send a patch.
Otherwise, I will try to add something like that at a later time.
regards,
- assaf