Tag: shell

Today, my sed kung-foo seemed to be lacking, so I ended up having to split the sed command over a zillion lines…

Normally I’d do something like :

sed 's/foo/bar/g' tmp.txt > tmp2.txt
sed 's/fo2/blah/g' tmp2.txt > tmp3.txt

But this obviously gets painful after a time, a different approach would be to use sponge where we can do :

sed 's/foo/bar/g' tmp.txt | sponge tmp.txt
sed 's/fo2/blah/g' tmp.txt | sponge tmp.txt

Whereby ‘sponge’ soaks up standard input and when there’s no more, opens the output file. This gets around the obvious problem that :

sed 's/foo/bar/g' tmp.txt > tmp.txt

doesn’t work because the shell opens (and overwrites) tmp.txt  before sed’s had a chance to do anything.