Re^3: Strange problem trying to clean garbage from start of mailbox file

i'm not a sed expert by any stretch of the imagination, but wouldn't

  sed -i -e '1d' $file
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be a more idiomatic way to write it?

I believe that piping output into the file you're stream-editing is not the most reliable thing to do. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's why your buffering by "|more" prevents the file from being clobbered.

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Re^4: Strange problem trying to clean garbage from start of mailbox file by capoeiraolly (Initiate) on Feb 02, 2006 at 23:42 UTC
I'm no sed expert either, in fact this is the first time I've used it. That's a much nicer way of doing things, cheers :)	[reply]
Re^4: Strange problem trying to clean garbage from start of mailbox file by capoeiraolly (Initiate) on Feb 02, 2006 at 23:45 UTC
Damn, sed on BSD dosn't have the -i option. I'll have a look at the man page to see if there is another way to do an in-place edit.	[reply]
Re^5: Strange Problem by graff (Chancellor) on Feb 03, 2006 at 03:29 UTC
Um, what sort of BSD are you using? When I do "man sed" on freebsd (and the bsd-based darwin on my mac), I see: `-i extension Edit files in-place, saving backups with the specified extension +. If a zero-length extension is given, no backup will be saved. I +t is not recommended to give a zero-length extension when in-place editing files, as you risk corruption or partial content in situ +- ations where disk space is exhausted, etc.` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^6: Strange Problem by capoeiraolly (Initiate) on Feb 07, 2006 at 20:16 UTC
Not sure which flavour of BSD is installed on this box as I didn't set it up myself, however sed -i produces : `sed: illegal option -- i usage: sed script [-an] [file ...] sed [-an] [-e script] ... [-f script_file] ... [file ...]` [download]	[reply] [d/l]