A rewrite primer

What it is

rewrite is a simple command-line utility that allows for the in-place rewrite of a file's contents, even where the file is being read from as the input. This makes transforming the contents of a file via other standard unix utilities dead simple, even when they expect the input and output files/streams to be physically separate.

The problem

You have a sequence of chained operations/commands that reads from a given file file, and you want to replace the contents of file with the result of that chain of commands. If you try to redirect the output of your script via something like > file or even | tee file, you'll find that more often than not, you'll lose everything and corrupt your data. That's because the upstream command is reading from the same file that is being written to, overwriting the input with the output.

The solution

rewrite makes it stupid easy to work around this problem. Just pipe the output of your pipeline/workflow to rewrite file and you'll get the result you expected. Easy peasey!

An example

Say we want to sort a file. We don't want to sort a copy of the file, we want to sort the file itself (obviously). Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Here's an example wherein we select 1024 random words from a dictionary file and then want to sort the output.

shuf -n 1024 /usr/share/dict/words > words.txt

We can easily sort this list with the sort utility, but what happens when we try to save the output to itself?

sort words.txt > words.txt # don't do this!

This will result in a complete loss of data, as the shell will set up the output file handle before sort gets a chance to open the same file to read it. In the end, you get neither this nor that and lose all data in the process!

Here's what you would normally do instead:

sort words.txt > temp
mv temp words.txt

Which is easy & straightforward enough, except when sort is part of a bigger workflow or a script, or when you forget, or when temp already exists, or when you don't have as straightforward of a case and don't realize that your source and destination files are one and the same. rewrite to the rescue!

Here's how simple using rewrite here would be:

sort words.txt | rewrite words.txt

Internally, rewrite does all the "magic" of reading from stdin and buffering the content until the upstream command has finished executing, then writing the output to the named file accordingly.

Installing rewrite

rewrite is written in rust for performance, safety, and out-of-the-box cross-platform support. Installing rewrite (presuming it's not already available as a binary for your platform in your favorite package manager) is as simple as

cargo install rewrite

Pre-built binaries for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X are available separately. Assistance packaging and distributing on platform-native package managers is welcome.

Dependencies

As of version 1.0, rewrite is free of any dependencies (native or otherwise).

License

rewrite is released to the general public without warranty in hopes of being useful under the terms of the MIT license. rewrite was written by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi, and development is sponsored by NeoSmart Technologies.