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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Why is editing a file by renaming the new one safer? Post 303042580 by Neo on Monday 30th of December 2019 11:35:38 AM
Old 12-30-2019
Practically speaking,

It depends on your risk management model.

If your system is prone to crashing or locking up, then it might be a better idea to copy the file to another server and do the edits, then load it up to the server and move it into place.

Sounds fishy, however, if your server is so unstable that it is prone to crashing or has such resource problems.

Normally, and I mean everyday on remote, production servers, I copy the file I want to edit and add a ".backup" or ".neo" extension on it, or something like that. But I generally edit the original file and save it to disk when I'm done.

When editing, you are editing a copy in memory, not the copy on disk; so if the system crashes while you are editing, you only lose the changes in the editor, not the file on disk.

I guess, one could say that when you cross the street, you should look right, then left, then up, and then down, and to be safe, look behind you too. However, most of us look right and left. If you want to edit copies and move them that's cool but it is not going to change much in your life compared to editing the original and saving it.

What is important, as mentioned by others and also by me again here, is to make a quick backup copy of a file before . you edit. I do this most of the time, even when I have offsite backups.

Making a copy, editing the copy, and moving it to replace the original file is still "not perfect" because you have still written over your original. You should at least make a copy, edit the original, and save it, knowing you have a fresh backup. If you copy the original, edit the copy, and move it to overwrite the original, where is your fresh backup? You don't have one (in this scenario). Ditto if you copy the file you just edited over the original, you then have two potentially "fat fingered" copies.

So, what's the point? What is the risk? What is the system vulnerability you are trying to mitigate?

Last edited by hicksd8; 12-30-2019 at 01:10 PM..
This User Gave Thanks to Neo For This Post:
 

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EX(1)							      General Commands Manual							     EX(1)

NAME
ex, edit - text editor SYNOPSIS
ex [ - ] [ -v ] [ -t tag ] [ -r ] [ +command ] [ -l ] name ... edit [ ex options ] DESCRIPTION
Ex is the root of a family of editors: edit, ex and vi. Ex is a superset of ed, with the most notable extension being a display editing facility. Display based editing is the focus of vi. If you have not used ed, or are a casual user, you will find that the editor edit is convenient for you. It avoids some of the complexi- ties of ex used mostly by systems programmers and persons very familiar with ed. If you have a CRT terminal, you may wish to use a display based editor; in this case see vi(1), which is a command which focuses on the display editing portion of ex. DOCUMENTATION
The document Edit: A tutorial (USD:14) provides a comprehensive introduction to edit assuming no previous knowledge of computers or the UNIX system. The Ex Reference Manual - Version 3.7 (USD:16) is a comprehensive and complete manual for the command mode features of ex, but you cannot learn to use the editor by reading it. For an introduction to more advanced forms of editing using the command mode of ex see the editing documents written by Brian Kernighan for the editor ed; the material in the introductory and advanced documents works also with ex. An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi (USD:15) introduces the display editor vi and provides reference material on vi. In addition, the Vi Quick Reference card summarizes the commands of vi in a useful, functional way, and is useful with the Introduction. FILES
/usr/share/misc/exstrings error messages /usr/libexec/exrecover recover command /usr/sbin/expreserve preserve command /etc/termcap describes capabilities of terminals ~/.exrc editor startup file /tmp/Exnnnnn editor temporary /tmp/Rxnnnnn named buffer temporary /usr/preserve preservation directory SEE ALSO
awk(1), ed(1), grep(1), sed(1), grep(1), vi(1), termcap(5), environ(7) AUTHOR
Originally written by William Joy Mark Horton has maintained the editor since version 2.7, adding macros, support for many unusual terminals, and other features such as word abbreviation mode. BUGS
The undo command causes all marks to be lost on lines changed and then restored if the marked lines were changed. Undo never clears the buffer modified condition. The z command prints a number of logical rather than physical lines. More than a screen full of output may result if long lines are present. File input/output errors don't print a name if the command line `-' option is used. There is no easy way to do a single scan ignoring case. The editor does not warn if text is placed in named buffers and not used before exiting the editor. Null characters are discarded in input files, and cannot appear in resultant files. 4th Berkeley Distribution October 21, 1996 EX(1)
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