[illumos-Developer] sed -i behavior - question

[Joerg Schilling]

Erik Trimble <erik.trimble at oracle.com> wrote:

> I'm all for as much GNU-compatibility as we can get, but not at the 
> price of POSIX compliance.  That is, if someone so very much needs GNU 
> sed, well, they know where that is.

BTW: the GNUsed man page claims that there may be no space between -i and the 
arg. So in theory this would be compatible to POSIX as long as it does not 
permit "-i" "arg" also.

> Frankly, as a long-term sed user, I think I've used '-i' maybe a couple 
> of times over 20 years.  For software packages that use GNU configure, 

I am using my "change" program since 1982 for such a purpose as gsed is a 
relatively young program.

Change creates *.bak files by default and seems to be more adequate for a 
non-interactive file edit.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily