[NTLUG:Discuss] In-place file editor

[Chris Cox]

Leroy Tennison wrote:
> Looking for a scriptable (non-interactive) program which will modify a 
> text file without deleting the original and replacing it with a new 
> one.  The reason is that the file has permissions associated with it 
> that I don't want to destroy and recreate.  I thought that sed's 'w' 
> command would do it:
> 
> s/10.12.14.16/2.3.4.5/wfixfile fixfile

perl -pi -e 's/10\.12\.14\.16/2\.3\.4\.5/' fixfile

If it's to be globally, add g after last slash.
Need to escape the periods.. even in sed they
mean any character.

> 
> but it truncates 'fixfile'.  Problem is that I'm wanting to modify the 
> data (change 10.12.14.16 to 2.3.4.5 in the example) in 'fixfile'.  If 
> I'm just doing it wrong then please post the way to do it.  If sed isn't 
> the program I need then is there one available?
> 
> Thanks for the input.
> 
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