Save modifications in place with awk
I am learning awk and I would like to know if there is an option to write changes to file, similar to sed where I would use -i option to save modifications to a file.
I do understand that I could use redirection to write changes. However is there an option in awk to do that?
Answer
In GNU Awk 4.1.0 (released 2013) and later, it has the option of "inplace" file editing:
[...] The "inplace" extension, built using the new facility, can be used to simulate the GNU "
sed -i" feature. [...]
Example usage:
$ gawk -i inplace '{ gsub(/foo/, "bar") }; { print }' file1 file2 file3
To keep the backup:
$ gawk -i inplace -v INPLACE_SUFFIX=.bak '{ gsub(/foo/, "bar") }
> { print }' file1 file2 file3