strange behaviour: sed follows symlink when reading but not when writing on -i and without --follow-symlinks

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

Hi.

The following is imho rather strange and should possibly be changed:

When doing a sed expression on a symbolic link and using -i, the 
symbolic link is afterwards removed and replaced by a regular copy of 
the (processed) file.

E.g.:

echo foo > regular
ln -s regular link
ls -al
sed -i "s/foo/bar/" link
ls -al


Now obviously there is --follow-symlinks... in which case, the sylink 
is not removed but correctly
But even if one argues, that the above behaviour is desired (which is a 
strange default IMHO), it's questionable why the symlink is followed 
(without --follow-symlinks) for reading, but not for writing.



Cheers,
Chris.