Hi bakunin,

thanks for the remarks about different aspects of sed -i.

Current GNU sed reapplies permissions and ownership after in-place edit. (Inodenumber is changed of course). I was not aware of that until know. Thanks for the hint. Grateful to the GNU-Developers, that they did a good job - here too.

See here(example as root user, so ownership-reapply is demonstrated):

Code:

# sed --version
# sed (GNU sed) 4.4

# ls -l test
-r--r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 5 Mär 14 14:16 test

# strace -o strace.out sed -r -i  's/bla/blub/' test

# ls -l test
-r--r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 5 Mär 14 14:17 test

# relevant parts within strace.out
# grep -E "(chmod|chown)" strace.out 
fchown(4, 33, 33)                       = 0
fchmod(4, 0100444)                      = 0

Yes, that's true. And as far as I understand, you are working in a more "pure" Unix-Environment (AIX, Solaris, ...) where this is very important to have scripts running on different platforms. And I assume scripts written will run on different platforms very often.

For my part I heavily rely on the GNU-Tools and what affects me, I'm working nearly 100% in a Linux environment(with different distributions) where the gnu collection is the default toolset in all cases. I think compatibility of my many scripts will break in lots of places because there are lots of differences in tools, different commands, same commands/different switches, ... . I think I would have a lot of extra work if I - for one thing - refrain from using the advanced feature set of the gnu tools and - for the other - to care about compatibility with systems I probably will never get in touch with.

Different worlds - Different rules ?