In-place processing with grep

Question

I\'ve got a script that calls grep to process a text file. Currently I am doing something like this.

$ grep \'SomeRegEx\' myfile.txt > myfile.txt.temp
$ m         


        

Answer 1

sponge (in moreutils package in Debian/Ubuntu) reads input till EOF and writes it into file, so you can grep file and write it back to itself.

Like this:

grep 'pattern' file | sponge file