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From: | Ed Morton |
Subject: | Re: [bug-gawk] in-place edit request |
Date: | Mon, 31 Dec 2012 09:03:14 -0600 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Thunderbird/17.0 |
Arnold - On 12/31/2012 6:48 AM, address@hidden wrote:
That is a significant improvement from what we need to do today. Thank you! Having said that, we then have these options for inplace editing:Hi Ed.Arnold - does the proposed solution allow the user to write: gawk -X 'script' file where "X" is some appropriate letter and the result is to update "file" with the result of executing "script" on the original contents of "file"? I just want to make sure we're talking about implementing something every bit as simple to use as the sed, perl, and ruby equivalents otherwise it's probably not worth bothering with.It would be gawk -i inplace 'script' file
sed -i 'script' file perl -i 'script' file ruby -i 'script' file awk -i inplace 'script' fileI understand from this email exchange that -i is being used by gawk for something else (though I don't see it mentioned at http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html#Options so I'm not sure what) so I assume that -i , unfortunately, is off the table (is it?) but is it really not possible to use "-<capital-i>" or some other single character so we can have:
sed -i 'script' file perl -i 'script' file ruby -i 'script' file awk -I 'script' fileRight now the chosen implementation is driving the interface. Couldn't we retain that implementation but also provide the interface the users would expect even if it means a little more code internally to map "-I" to the "-i inplace" functionality?
There is nothing stopping anyone from writing a one line wrapper: $ cat aip # Awk In Place #! /bin/sh exec gawk -i inplace "$@" Arnold
The goal is to avoid people having to write wrapper scripts for awk when they don't need to for sed, perl, ruby, etc.
To be clear, IMHO providing "-i inplace" is doing 90% of the work to make awk behave like it's peers, it'd just be the icing on the cake if we could get that remaining 10%....
Ed.
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