sponge¶

Soak up stdin and release to stdout after EOF.

Synopsis¶

tofu sponge [flags]

Description¶

Read all input from stdin until EOF, storing it in memory (or a temporary file if too large). Only after all input is read does it output to stdout. Useful for in-place file modifications in pipelines.

Flags¶

Flag	Short	Description	Default
`--max-size`	`-m`	Maximum size in memory before buffering to temp file	`10m`

Examples¶

In-place file modification:

cat file.txt | grep "pattern" | tofu sponge > file.txt

Sort a file in place:

sort file.txt | tofu sponge > file.txt

With custom memory limit:

cat largefile.txt | tofu sponge -m 100m > output.txt

Why Use Sponge?¶

Without sponge, this would fail:

# DON'T DO THIS - file gets truncated before reading!
cat file.txt | grep "pattern" > file.txt

With sponge:

# This works correctly
cat file.txt | grep "pattern" | tofu sponge > file.txt

Size Format¶

The --max-size flag accepts: - 10m or 10M - 10 megabytes - 1g or 1G - 1 gigabyte - 512k or 512K - 512 kilobytes

Notes¶

Input is stored in memory up to the max size, then spills to a temporary file
Output only starts after all input is read
Temporary files are automatically cleaned up