Subject: Re: bug#32069: Man page description is wrong for -i

From: Assaf Gordon <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2018 15:43:01 -0600

Hello,

On 06/07/18 02:54 PM, Matthew Jenkins wrote:
> I'm not asking to change the behavior of sed. I'm asking to have the
> man page reflect what sed -i actually does to at least be less wrong
> so it's less of a gotcha.
> 
> Examples of gotchas:
> sed -i on a large file when you only have less than that amount of
> space available.
> sed -i on a hard link

when out of disk space, 'sed -i' behaves in a very reasonable and safe way:
it will fail to create the temporary file, and leave the original file 
unmodified.

As for 'sed -i' on hard-link:
"sed -i" has never maintained hard-links with "--in-place",
and neither does any other common unix utility - so it is not clear
where this expectation originates from.

> I'm sure there are more but these gotchas wouldn't be gotchas anymore
> with a better description.

"sed -i" certainly has some gotchas, and few are documented in the manual:
https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html#index-_002df

It seems the "in-place" related topics are growing, perhaps it is
warranted to dedicated a separate section in the manual.

If you'd like to try and add such a section - please do send a patch.

Otherwise, I will try to add something like that at a later time.

regards,
  - assaf