Formatting multiple json files recursively

Question

This is a theoretical question about minimizing side effects in bash scripting.

I recently used a simple mechanism for formatting a bunch of json files, in a nested directory structure...

for f in `find ./ -name *json`; do echo $f ; python -mjson.tool $f > /tmp/1 && cp /tmp/1 $f ; done.   

The mechanism is simply to

• format each file using python's mjson.tool,
• write it to a tmp location, and
• then rewrite it back in place.

Is there a way to do this which is more elegant, i.e. with minimal side effects? I'm assuming bash experts have a better way of doing this sort of thing .

Answer 1

Unix tools working on a streaming basis -- they don't store all of the contents of the files in memory at once. Therefore, you have to use an intermediary location since you would be overwriting a file that is currently being read from.

You may consider that your snippet isn't fault tolerant. If you make a mistake, you would have just overwritten all your data. You should store the output in a new location, verify, then move to overwrite. :)