On Wednesday 2006 December 20 14:33, Rogan Dawes wrote: > It wouldn't, since the redirection overwrites the file at the same time Of course you are correct; however it wasn't completely crazy. Before now, I've replaced files in C by doing fd_old = open( "someexistingfile" ); unlink( "someexistingfile" ); fd_new = open( "someexistingfile" ); So I was really just trying it in case bash did a similar thing internally. > as trying to read from it. A better way is to redirect to a temp file, > and rename it if the previous operation was successful. That's what I ended up doing; as you say it's better anyway because the error conditions don't mean that the .gitmodules file ends up half written. Andy -- Dr Andy Parkins, M Eng (hons), MIEE andyparkins@xxxxxxxxx - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html