Exploring CLI Best Practices

Re:Exploring CLI Best Practices by marvy on Tuesday October 11, 2016 @11:27PM (#12690252)

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.

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Re:Exploring CLI Best Practices by d0mine on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @12:52AM (#12690494)

A general solution is something like:

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

Check whether:

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

works with your version of the sort utility.

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Re:Exploring CLI Best Practices by shabble on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @05:38PM (#12696601)

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?)

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Re:Exploring CLI Best Practices by eichin on Monday October 17, 2016 @03:40PM (#12728766)

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 :-)

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