Re: GNU Awk - inplace editing

On 5/23/2025 12:28 AM, Janis Papanagnou 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 manual now suggests to use a GNU Awk "inplace" _Extension_ for that
   gawk -i inplace ...
and
   gawk -i inplace -v inplace::suffix=.bak ...
respectively.
 That's not exactly as simple to use as, say,
   gawk -i ...
and
   gawk -i.bak
so I suppose there's a reason for the added complexity in the handling.
 Does anyone know that reason or remember a rationale? - I don't recall
any discussions about that...

The somewhat lengthy discussion at https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gawk/2012-12/msg00046.html may (or may not) be useful.
Ed.