How can I use a file in a command and redirect output to the same file without truncating it?

Question

Use sponge for this kind of tasks. Its part of moreutils.

Try this command:

 grep -v 'seg[0-9]\{1,\}\.[0-9]\{1\}' file_name | sponge file_name

You cannot do that because bash processes the redirections first, then executes the command. So by the time grep looks at file_name, it is already empty. You can use a temporary file though.

#!/bin/sh
tmpfile=$(mktemp)
grep -v 'seg[0-9]\{1,\}\.[0-9]\{1\}' file_name > ${tmpfile}
cat ${tmpfile} > file_name
rm -f ${tmpfile}

like that, consider using mktemp to create the tmpfile but note that it's not POSIX.

Use sed instead:

sed -i '/seg[0-9]\{1,\}\.[0-9]\{1\}/d' file_name

try this simple one

grep -v 'seg[0-9]\{1,\}\.[0-9]\{1\}' file_name | tee file_name

Your file will not be blank this time :) and your output is also printed to your terminal.

One liner alternative - set the content of the file as variable:

VAR=`cat file_name`; echo "$VAR"|grep -v 'seg[0-9]\{1,\}\.[0-9]\{1\}' > file_name

You can't use redirection operator (> or >>) to the same file, because it has a higher precedence and it will create/truncate the file before the command is even invoked. To avoid that, you should use appropriate tools such as tee, sponge, sed -i or any other tool which can write results to the file (e.g. sort file -o file).

Basically redirecting input to the same original file doesn't make sense and you should use appropriate in-place editors for that, for example Ex editor (part of Vim):

ex '+g/seg[0-9]\{1,\}\.[0-9]\{1\}/d' -scwq file_name

where:

• '+cmd'/-c - run any Ex/Vim command
• g/pattern/d - remove lines matching a pattern using global (help :g)
• -s - silent mode (man ex)
• -c wq - execute :write and :quit commands

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You may use sed to achieve the same (as already shown in other answers), however in-place (-i) is non-standard FreeBSD extension (may work differently between Unix/Linux) and basically it's a stream editor, not a file editor. See: Does Ex mode have any practical use?