I come from a no-tempfile world, where you getc and putc
When moving from legacy Unixes to Linux, inline editting became legend. Number of utilities like sed can now edit the file without tempfile.
Your AIX sysadmin probably used to do
sed "s/xxx/yyy/" /etc/importantfile > /tmp/importantfile
mv /tmp/importantfile /etc
which works… BUT it has a lot of issues, like permission, parallel processing and numerous other.
A typical fatality occurs if /tmp gets full, then sed generates only a broken file, and game over.
Okay, Linux save the world
sed -i "s/xxx/yyy/" /etc/importantfile
The file is editted in-place 👿
Of course it is a lie. This is just an extension of sed that does the tempfile magic trick and “apparently” edit the file. The file is not editted.
It get’s a new inode. If it is a link, it is converted to a file, it lose its property and so on
$ ls -li xxx
537 -rwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4 Apr 10 12:19 xxx
$ sed -i '/wtf/{}' xxx
$ ls -li xxx
500 -rwxrwxrwx. 1 user01 user01 4 Apr 10 12:19 xxx
Just take care with -i, it does some magic, but maybe not all the magic you expected