GNU bug report logs - #21128
Is this a BUG? Please Help Me !

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: "liuquan" <liuquan <at> csu.edu.cn>
To: "bug-coreutils" <bug-coreutils <at> gnu.org>
Subject: Is this a BUG? Please Help Me !
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2015 16:20:10 +0800

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Dear, engineer! 
I'm writing this E-mail to you since I think I've found something wrong in Ubuntu!
My Operating System here is Ubuntu Kylin 14.04.
I find a question about command 'paste' in command line.
Support there is a file called "test.txt", and its content is the next 2 lines:
ab
cd
If I run the command "paste test.txt", the content of this file will be print at STDOUT. However, when I ran the command "paste test.txt > test.txt" I found that the file "test.txt" became an empty file. Here comes the question, what's going on? Can you help me?
 
 
Yours faithfully,
Quan Liu from Central South University!
 
2015-07-24


Quan Liu 

[Message part 2 (text/html, inline)]

Message #8 received at 21128 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigBrady.com>
To: liuquan <liuquan <at> csu.edu.cn>, 21128 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#21128: Is this a BUG? Please Help Me !
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2015 16:46:26 +0100

tag 21128 notabug
close 21128
stop

On 24/07/15 09:20, liuquan wrote:
> Dear, engineer! 
> 
> I'm writing this E-mail to you since I think I've found something wrong in Ubuntu!
> 
> My Operating System here is Ubuntu Kylin 14.04.
> 
> I find a question about command 'paste' in command line.
> 
> Support there is a file called "test.txt", and its content is the next 2 lines:
> 
> ab
> 
> cd
> 
> If I run the command "paste test.txt", the content of this file will be print at STDOUT. However, when I ran the command "paste test.txt > test.txt" I found that the file "test.txt" became an empty file. Here comes the question, what's going on? Can you help me?

The shell truncated the file before paste could read it.
You need to write to a temp file first. For details see:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/unix_file_replacement.html

thanks,
Pádraig.

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