Hi Ed.
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:12:48 -0600
From: Ed Morton <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: [bug-gawk] in-place edit request
Can we get an in-place edit function for gawk like
sed, perl, ruby., etc. have with their "-i" option? It
should behave like perl does. See the discussion at
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.awk/ORwDyRRBcHE.
Regards,
Ed Morton
Thank you for your note.
Janis Papanagnou and Mauel Collado both raised a number of questions as
to how this would work and even if it's a good idea.
First, the proposal is not well defined. "Just do what perl does" isn't
good enough. Second, I don't think it's even a good idea. It would
complicate the code considerably, and I think that the general use case
can be solved using a shell script (as I wrote in comp.lang.awk).
Thanks,
Arnold