Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!watdragon!twhlai
From: twhlai@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Tony Lai)
Newsgroups: alt.sources
Subject: hold -- a program to buffer input
Message-ID: <8082@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 31 Jul 88 03:14:57 GMT
Reply-To: twhlai@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Tony Lai)
Distribution: alt
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 40

A few weeks ago, a program called "hold" was posted to comp.sources.misc that
buffers its input.  The idea is that something like
  sed 's/a/b/g' foo > foo
makes foo a null file, while
  sed 's/a/b/g' foo | hold foo
changes all a's to b's in foo, because hold prevents foo from being overwritten
before sed finishes reading foo.

Here is a simple Bourne shell script to do this.

#!/bin/sh
#
# This is a shell archive.  Remove anything before this line,
# then unpack it by saving it in a file and typing "sh file".
#
# The files contained herein are:
#  hold
#
echo 'extracting hold'
if test -f hold; then echo 'shar: not overwriting hold'; else
sed 's/^X//' << 'EOF' > hold
X#!/bin/sh
Xif [ $# -gt 1 ]
Xthen
X  echo 'Usage: hold [file]' 1>&2
X  exit 1
Xfi
Xf=/tmp/hold.$$
Xcat > $f
Xcase $# in
X0) cat $f ;;
X1) cat $f > $1
Xesac
X/bin/rm -f $f
EOF
if test `wc -c < hold` -ne 158; then
echo 'shar: hold was damaged during transit (should have been 158 bytes)'
fi
fi
exit 0