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

No, in general it can't be done in Unix like this. You can only create/truncate (with >) or append to a file (with >>). Once truncated, the old contents would be lost.