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

[Ed Morton]

Arnold - thanks for getting back to me. I responded at comp.lang.awk. The shell 
script solution is horrible. If I want to change "foo" to "bar" for all the 
files in my directory I have these choices:

   find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} \;

   find . -type f -exec sh -c (awk '{gsub(/foo/,"bar"}1' {} > tmp/tmp$$ && mv 
/tmp/tmp$$ {} \;')

and I'm sure I got the syntax of that shell+awk solution wrong.

It's just too lengthy, complicated, and error prone and even for more involved 
scripts it makes people choose complicated sed solutions over trivial awk solutions.

    Ed.

On 12/23/2012 4:29 AM, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> 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