As an easy example, consider the following command:
$ sort file.txt
This will output the file's data in sorted order. How do I put that data right back into the same file? I want to update the file with the sorted results.
This is not the solution:
$ sort file.txt > file.txt
... as it will cause the file to come out blank. Is there a way to update this file without creating a temporary file?
Sure, I could do something like this:
sort file.txt > temp.txt; mv temp.txt file.txt
But I would rather keep the results in memory until processing is done, and then write them back to the same file. sort actually has a flag that will allow this to be possible:
sort file.txt -o file.txt
...but I'm looking for a solution that doesn't rely on the binary having a special flag to account for this, as not all are guaranteed to. Is there some kind of linux command that will hold the data until the processing is finished?
For sort, you can use the -o option.
For a more general solution, you can use sponge, from the moreutils package:
sort file.txt | sponge file.txt
As mentioned below, error handling here is tricky. You may end up with an empty file if something goes wrong in the steps before sponge.
This is a duplicate of this question, which discusses the solutions above: How do I execute any command editing its file (argument) "in place" using bash?