Redirection not overwriting file but just producing a blank one

Question

I have a command that strives to just read a file and then comment out every single line in it indiscriminately, then overwrite the existing file.

cat file | sed 's/^/#/g' > file

But to my surprise this doesn't actually work and actually just produces a blank file. From my understanding of pipes this shouldn't happen given that stdout goes to sed, is processed by sed and then sent to the file. So I'd like to know why this is happening

In place of my expected behavior I implemented a workaround.

cat file | sed 's/^/#/g' > /tmp/file; mv /tmp/file file

Why does my does my original solution not work though?

possible duplicate of Can I read and write to the same file in Linux without overwriting it? — Scott - Слава Україні, Feb 18 '15 at 23:02
... Also redirect to the same file as the source file processed by the command. — Scott - Слава Україні, Feb 18 '15 at 23:09

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 18 '15 at 22:18

7

Your original solution does not work because as soon as you redirect, the shell creates an empty file by that name. You can use the -i option of sed to fix this problem. For example,

sed -i 's/^/#/g' file

answered Feb 18 '15 at 22:18

unxnut

6,008

Redirection not overwriting file but just producing a blank one

1 Answers1

Linked