On 2018-08-13 06:40, Tim Chase wrote:
Synopsis: "sed -i" not renaming/moving temp-file
sed -i works just fine for me. It's really the use of ';q' that seems
to cause the behavior.
This seems like expected behavior for sed when ;q is present.
Description:
"sed -i.bak '/2/d;q' file.txt" leaves temp file instead of renaming.
How-To-Repeat:
$ mkdir sedbug
$ cd sedbug
$ jot 5 > file.txt
$ sed -e '/2/d;q' file.txt # expected behavior: 1 line
1
$ sed -i.bak -e '/2/d;q' file.txt # edit it in-place
$ ls
file.txt sedpK7uniHbMN
$ cat file.txt # still has original contents
1
2
3
4
5
$ cat sedpK7uniHbMN
1
Expected results:
the resulting temp-file (which contains the correct data) should be
moved back atop the original source file(s).
What does "q" do? Its not commonly used. From SED(1):
[1addr]q
Branch to the end of the script and quit without starting a
new
cycle.
This is probably the command line you actually want, no '...;q' needed -
will delete any line with "2" in it in file.txt, and will save the old
one to file.txt.bak:
sed -i.bak -e '/2/d' file.txt
By putting ";q" in the sed command string, sed is told to cut out at the
end of a loop. In OpenBSD, this will mean your particular sed command
will exit out after it makes a transformation in a temp file. MacOS
does something similar. Linux cuts the temp file out mid-way, leaving a
partial result. Its not totally surprising to me that sed is leaving
the temp file, its only half way done, so to speak.
