Re: sudo question
On Thursday 21 November 2024 02:16:48 pm Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2024 at 19:55:04 +0100, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 21, 2024 at 06:44:37PM +0000, Darac Marjal wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > > If it helps, "sponge" (in the moreutils package) seems to offer the right
> > > interface here:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Oh, wow -- thanks for that little gem!
>
> For the record, sponge -a doesn't actually append to the original
> file. As the man page says,
>
> -a
>
> Replace the file with a new file that contains the file's original
> content, with the standard input appended to it. This is done
> atomically when possible.
>
>
> hobbit:~$ ls -li y
> 847514 -rw-r--r-- 1 greg greg 8 Nov 21 07:18 y
> hobbit:~$ echo quux | sponge -a y
> hobbit:~$ ls -li y
> 6684744 -rw-r--r-- 1 greg greg 13 Nov 21 14:11 y
>
> The inode number changed, because it's a new file. This may be desirable
> or not -- it all depends on your needs. If the file in question is a log
> file that some program may still be writing to, then this is absolutely
> NOT desirable.
Why would you want to append to a file that some other program is also writing to? Sounds messy...
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