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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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MAILCAP.ORDER(5)                                               Order Mailcap Entries                                              MAILCAP.ORDER(5)

NAME
/etc/mailcap.order - the mailcap ordering specifications DESCRIPTION
The order of entries in the /etc/mailcap file can be altered by editing the /etc/mailcap.order file. Each line of that file specifies a package and an optional mime type. Mailcap entries that match will be placed in the order of this file. Entries that don't match will be placed later. Example mime-support:*/* gv:application/postscript netscape:text/html less:text/* emacs:text/* The above would make any entries provided by the mime-support package (as found in the /usr/lib/mime/packages directory) take priority over everything else. The gv package will be used over anything else when it comes to postscript documents. Netscape will be used for any html documents and less will be used for any remaining text documents. However, since neither netscape or less provide for editing documents, any edit or compose actions will fall through to the emacs rules. After modifying this file, be sure to run /usr/sbin/update-mime (as root) to propagate the changes into the /etc/mailcap file. Remember that this files takes package names and not executable names. If you want to define rules that reference specific programs, the best way is to include them in ~/.mailcap or the user section of the /etc/mailcap file. LIMITATIONS
There is currently no way to break out a certain type from a wildcard rule. If, for example, both xv and gimp were to specify "image/*" rules, it isn't possible to use xv for gif images but use gimp for jpeg images. Also, I would like to add the ability to specify certain actions in the rules. For example, if netscape were to have an edit rule but I wanted to use emacs for editing/creating html documents, I could place a line like emacs:text/* action=edit|compose before the netscape entry. The update-mime program would then spit out entries such that netscape view rule comes before the emacs view rule but have the netscape edit rule comes after the emacs edit rule. SEE ALSO
mailcap(5) run-mailcap(1) update-mime(8) AUTHOR
The mailcap.order specification was written by Brian White <bcwhite@pobox.com> Debian Project 16th Aug 1998 MAILCAP.ORDER(5)
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