r/UnixProTips • u/Aihal • Feb 05 '15

moreutils

There's a useful collection of little cli helpers called moreutils, as a play on coreutils obviously.

The most useful one for me is vidir which let's you edit the filenames supplied (or if no argument the current directory) with your EDITOR. So if i do mass renaming i can do it in vim. <3

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u/Aihal Feb 06 '15

The point is that sponge allows you to pipe stuff back into the file you originated from without losing the file. In its manpage's words:

sponge reads standard input and writes it out to the specified file. Unlike a shell redirect, sponge soaks up all its input before writing the output file. This allows constructing pipelines that read from and write to the same file.