in reply to Re^4: Strange problem trying to clean garbage from start of mailbox file
in thread Strange problem trying to clean garbage from start of mailbox file

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.

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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 ...]

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