Re: GNU Awk - inplace editing

On 25.05.2025 22:27, Ed Morton wrote:

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.

Hi Ed,

this is very valuable, and more than I expected; it has some technical
discussions, it shows the "feelings", opinions and rationales, and all
around it. Also the contained link to the Usenet discussions from that
time (where we participated, obviously) was a good addition, and also
to recall the thoughts, wishes and doubts we had back then. - Thanks!

Janis