sort is a bad example: to support sorting in-place, it has to know the file name. Pity the user who typed

    sort < bigfile > bigfile

for said user just lost a file.

A general solution is something like:

  $ sort "$name" | sponge "$name"

Check whether:

  $ sort -o "$name" "$name" 

works with your version of the sort utility.

This has bitten me occasionally, even though I know the workarounds (tempfiles or pipe-consumers like sponge(1)).

I'm wondering if there's any practical use for the behaviour, or if it's worth hacking a shell such that it produces a warning/interactive confirm prompt for it (or transparently buffers to DWIM maybe?)

It's pretty common to `set -o noclobber` in beginner dotfiles; doing deferred-open-if-exists is an interesting idea that would probably get a lot of resistance :-)