On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 05:48:41PM +0100, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
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> I encountered something rather odd and in my eyes disturbing: if I edit
> a symlinked file with an ordinary editor (nano, kate, ...) the editor
> edits the file instead and leaves the symlink intact.
>
> If I 'edit' the same symlink via "sed -i", the symlink gets replaced by
> the saved file and the linked file is not changed.
>
> Is this normal behaviour? Is there a way to tell sed to edit the link's
> target instead?
Yes, it's what I would expect. sed is a stream editor, which means it
makes a single pass over the file and sends its output to STDOUT or a
temporary file if invoked with '-i'. In the latter case it then renames
the temporary file to the original file name. It's the same as if you
did (where myfile is a symbolic link):
cp myfile tmpfile
mv tmpfile myfile
This overwrites the symbolic link with the actual file. To do what you
want sed would have to copy the temp file and then remove it, two
operations rather than one.
--
"No people do so much harm as those who go around doing good."
-- Mandell Creighton (1843-1901)
Rick Pasotto [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.niof.net
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