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

In general, this can't be done. But Perl has the -i switch:

perl -i -ne 'print if /SomeRegEx/' myfile.txt

Writing -i.bak will cause the original to be saved in myfile.txt.bak.

(Of course internally, Perl just does basically what you're already doing -- there's no special magic involved.)