NAME¶

inplace - emulate sed/perl/ruby in-place editing

SYNOPSIS¶

gawk -i inplace ...

DESCRIPTION¶

The inplace extension adds two functions named inplace_begin() and inplace_end(). These functions are meant to be invoked from the inplace.awk wrapper which is installed when gawk is.

By default, each named file on the command line is replaced with a new file of the same name whose contents are the results of running the AWK program. If the user supplies an AWK variable named inplace::suffix in a BEGIN rule or on the command line, then the inplace extension concatenates that suffix onto the original filename and uses the result as a filename for renaming the original.

For backwards compatibility, the variable will also check INPLACE_SUFFIX (in the awk namespace) for the suffix to use if inplace::suffix is not set.

One can disable inplace editing selectively by placing inplace::enable=0 on the command line prior to files that should be processed normally. One can reenable inplace editing by placing inplace::enable=1 prior to files that should be subject to inplace editing.

BUGS¶

While the extension does attempt to preserve ownership and permissions, it makes no attempt to copy the ACLs from the original file.

If the program dies prematurely, as might happen if an unhandled signal is received, a temporary file may be left behind.

EXAMPLE¶

gawk -i inplace 'script' files ...


gawk -i inplace -f scriptfile files ...

SEE ALSO¶

GAWK: Effective AWK Programming, filefuncs(3am), fnmatch(3am), fork(3am), ordchr(3am), readdir(3am), readfile(3am), revoutput(3am), rwarray(3am).

AUTHOR¶

Andrew Schorr, schorr@telemetry-investments.com.

COPYING PERMISSIONS¶

Copyright © 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2019, Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual page provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual page under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual page into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Foundation.