On Thu, Sep 06, 2012 at 11:23:21AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 09/06/2012 10:35 AM, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> Why can't 'sed -i' be made atomic for the user?
> Today, it creates a temporary file for the output.
> At the end, it calls rename(). What if it instead
> rewinds the input and that temporary file and copies
> it's content to the input file?
That's kind of what 'sort -o' does, and it also
has race conditions. For example, in that last phase
while it's copying the content to the input file, some other
process might be reading the input file.
I don't think that matters. In fact I like to be able to use
tail -f to see what's being written to a file, and find it
the mozilla like behaviour, where I have to wait until the
entire file is downloaded in order to see the first byte,
rather annoying.
J'
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