On Sun, 2019-12-15 at 13:29 -0800, Zac Medico wrote: > On 12/13/19 2:12 PM, Michael 'veremitz' Everitt wrote: > > On 13/12/19 20:36, Michał Górny wrote [excerpted]: > > > Is this really an argument for or *against* it? Developers are entirely > > > capable of keeping seds that do nothing for years, as well as patches > > > that -- while apparently applying correctly -- are entirely meaningless. > > <snip> > > > > I think there is some merit in some kind of feedback when sed's are doing > > nothing, although how feasible it is to generate any useful feedback I > > can't say. I wouldn't say it needs to explicitly fail or make lots of > > noise, just an info message that could prompt some further investigation. > > > > It's possible to implement a sed wrapper that detects file arguments for > -i/--in-place mode, and compares file content before and after the sed call. > > There are also ways to make sed exit with an error but that won't be as > easy to use as a sed wrapper: > > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15965073/return-code-of-sed-for-no-match/15966279
Don't forget that there could be valid cases for sed not changing a file. Not to mention corner cases where a working replacement results in no change, e.g.: # yuck! sed -i -e "s^-O2^${CFLAGS}^" ... -- Best regards, Michał Górny
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