Re: [bug-gawk] in-place edit request

[Aharon Robbins]

Hi Ed.

> Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:12:48 -0600
> From: Ed Morton <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: [bug-gawk] in-place edit request
>
> Can we get an in-place edit function for gawk like
> sed, perl, ruby., etc. have with their "-i" option? It
> should behave like perl does. See the discussion at
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.awk/ORwDyRRBcHE.
>
> Regards,
>
>      Ed Morton

Thank you for your note.

Janis Papanagnou and Mauel Collado both raised a number of questions as
to how this would work and even if it's a good idea.

First, the proposal is not well defined. "Just do what perl does" isn't
good enough. Second, I don't think it's even a good idea. It would
complicate the code considerably, and I think that the general use case
can be solved using a shell script (as I wrote in comp.lang.awk).

Thanks,

Arnold