Re: GNU Awk - inplace editing

On 2025-05-23, Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:

In GNU Awk I was looking for the in-place option (similar to sed -i).
I thought there once was some _simple_ option usable from the command
line. (Or am I misremembering?)

The the "-i inplace" thing was introduced in May 2013, by
the GNU Awk 4.1.0 release. So, almost exactly twelve years ago now.

The release notes do not mention that any existing inplace
mechanism was being replaced. It mensions only sed -i.

However, like you, I also seem to have same strange memory that there
had been some earlier inplace mechanism that was deprecated.
It might have been something very short-lived?

The manual has a Feature History, but that is unreliable;
since it doesn't mention the -i inplace feature either,

Btw, spotted something mildly funny in the gawk git:

commit cce5115e21db1702e0617afdca36633e7e2c9eae (tag: gawk-2.11.1)
Author: Arnold D. Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>
Date:   Thu Jul 15 23:24:47 2010 +0300

    Move to gawk 2.11.1 as found on Walnut Creek CD-ROM.

commit 3697ec5ca140f686643d204a54181a5ddbf9a799 (tag: gawk-2.11)
Author: Arnold D. Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>
Date:   Thu Jul 15 23:12:49 2010 +0300

    Moved to gawk 2.11.

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