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

[Manuel Collado]

El 02/01/2013 0:33, Andrew J. Schorr escribió:
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 10:18:32PM +0200, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> > Now someone in the community, who thinks this feature is worthwhile,
> > needs to step up to the plate and do the work.
>
> I just whipped up a proof of concept.  It is attached.  It seems to work
> on linux.  For example, these commands do the right thing:
>
>    bash$ gawk -i inplace '{sub(/foo/, "bar"); print}' /tmp/tfile
>
>    bash$ gawk -i inplace -v "INPLACE_SUFFIX=.bak" '{sub(/foo/, "bar"); print}' 
> /tmp/tfile
> [....]

> Thoughts?

It seems useful. And probably will make Ed happy.

Just an additional thought. The -i behavior of Perl and Ruby, is usually 
combined with an additional -p flag that makes the final 'print' statement 
unnecessary. I.e., in gawk it would implicitly add a final '{print}' rule 
to the whole awk program. This -p flags makes sense by itself, not only as 
a -i companion.

I assume this feature cannot be implemented with the current extension 
mechanism, so it would be probably better to disregard it. But anyway I 
think it is worth just to mention it (perhaps in the inplace extension 
documentation).

Regards,
--
Manuel Collado - http://lml.ls.fi.upm.es/~mcollado