"Paul Eggert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Instead of adding a new option, I think I'd rather change 'sort' to > cater to your (relatively common) case, rather than to the (relatively > contrived) cases like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G' where people should > know that they're getting into trouble anyway.
I completely agree that this example is quite contrived, and your patch is welcome. Yet there is a simple way to fix sort's behaviour to cater to this case without resorting (no pun intended) to a temporary file. sort should first try to unlink the output file before opening it in "w" mode. cat would keep reading the old file while sort writes to a new file with the same name. reasons why this would fail are : - bogus file system (windows) -> current behaviour - output file is a symlink -> the user will get in trouble with this sooner or later -> check for this and do not unlink that. - inode number for output file will change. is this a problem ? Is there a major reason I'm missing that makes this kind of change undesirable ? Chqrle. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
