sed -i

[Diomidis Spinellis]

Yar Tikhiy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Recently noticed that our sed(1) differs from its GNU analog in
> that in -i mode it considers all files as a single sequence of lines
> while the latter treats each file independently.  The in-line mode
> isn't in POSIX, so it isn't really clear which way is correct.
> 
> Here is a couple of practical consequences:
> 
> - our sed won't act on a numeric range of lines in each file,
>   as in: sed -i '' 2,5d *, which may be counter-intuitive.
> - our sed's line ranges can span file boundaries in -i mode.
> 
> If the second feature isn't important, I think we should use
> a separate line space for each file edited in-line, which is
> usually desired.
> 
> Comments?
> 
> P.S. Attached are a test script and outputs from it for our
> sed and GNU sed as found in a Linux I have access to.
> 

I believe the GNU interpretation of lines in -i makes sense.

Diomidis - dds@