No, this is not about a quiz on regexp compatibility between Perl
and sed.
Back when
cdbdc6bf (t: refactor tests depending on Perl substitution
operator, 2025-04-03) rewrote many uses of perl with sed, the general
pattern of the original scripts were
chmod +w some_read_only_file &&
perl -p -e "regexp to munge" some_read_only_file >some_tmp &&
mv some_tmp some_read_only_file
persumably because the author knew that replacing some_read_only_file
with "mv" at the last step would not work without "mv -f" in some
environments (GNU seems to succeed without giving any prompt when
not running interactively, which is what happens when running t/
scripts). Replacing perl with sed would be fine as long as sed with
updated regexp does the equivalent munging.
But one place used to use a different construct in the original:
perl -i.bak -p -e "regexp to munge" some_read_only_file
With _no_ temporary file or "mv", "perl -i" allows you to replace a
read-only file in place.
When we replaced the use of "perl" with "sed" in the said commit,
however, because "sed -i" is not portable, we rewrote that in-place
replacement to
sed "regexp to munge" some_read_only_file >some_tmp &&
mv some_tmp some_read_only_file
Again, unfortunately that does not work in some environment, without
"mv -f".
We could run "mv -f" here, but we would then need to remove "chmod
+w" and have them use "mv -f" instead at all places that were
touched
cdbdc6bf (t: refactor tests depending on Perl substitution
operator, 2025-04-03) to be consistent (and more concise).
For now, let's make it consistent in the other direction by mimick
the other places that made the target read-write before moving.
Speaking of portability, the outcome of using "sed" on non-text
files is unspecified, so the entire exercise of
cdbdc6bf may have
needed to be reverted if people still used ancient version of
"standard compliant" sed that barfs on non-text files, but these
days we may be able to get away with "BSDs and GNU seem OK with it"
;-) But one fix at a time.
Reported-by: Torsten Bögershausen <tboegi@web.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>