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Comment by thomashabets2 | Hacker News Reader

ts looks like it's a subset of https://github.com/ThomasHabets/ind

sponge can be replaced with dd

Other than that, yeah nice ideas. And very much in the unix spirit of one tool to do one thing.

sponge buffers the whole input before writing the output. Its utility would be in reading from a file, working on it with other tools, and writing the result back to the original file, all in one line.

I know I wanted to do this, but I am very happy such a utility doesn't exist. Unix utilities, usually work in a pipeline fashion, read line -> process -> write to output. This allows them to allocate a limited amount of memory. If you read all input in memory, you are asking for trouble: 'cat /dev/zero | sponge a'.

That is the point.

I routinely operate on machines with gigabytes of memory, but rarely write pipelines which output gigabytes of data, so this has never been a concern for me. But even then, there’s still swap space which is effectively like using a temp file but lazier.

By the way, I think you’d be in even more trouble if you wrote:

    cat /dev/zero > a

Oh, neat! Thanks.

Seems like the example command should be easily doable with just `sed -i`, though.

sed -i 's/root/toor/;/joey/d' /etc/passwd

But I get your point.

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