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From: mack@the-knife.org (Mack The Knife)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.awk
Subject: Re: GNU Awk - inplace editing
References: <100p11m$3uh3m$1@dont-email.me>
Organization: Knife Sharpeners, Inc.
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Date: 25 May 2025 04:00:02 GMT
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In article <100p11m$3uh3m$1@dont-email.me>,
Janis Papanagnou  <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:
>In GNU Awk I was looking for the in-place option (similar to sed -i).
>I thought there once was some _simple_ option usable from the command
>line. (Or am I misremembering?)

You are misremembering.

>The manual now suggests to use a GNU Awk "inplace" _Extension_ for that
>  gawk -i inplace ...
>and
>  gawk -i inplace -v inplace::suffix=.bak ...
>respectively.
> ....
>Does anyone know that reason or remember a rationale? - I don't recall
>any discussions about that...

It was done with an extension because the maintainer saw no
reason to add Yet Another Option and Still More Code That Would
See Very Little Use into the main core of gawk.