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From: Ed Morton <mortonspam@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.awk
Subject: Re: GNU Awk - inplace editing
Date: Sun, 25 May 2025 15:27:27 -0500
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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.