sed edit file in place

Question

I am trying to find out if it is possible to edit a file in a single sed command without manually streaming the edited content into a new file and

Answer 1

You didn't specify what shell you are using, but with zsh you could use the =( ) construct to achieve this. Something along the lines of:

cp =(sed ... file; sync) file

=( ) is similar to >( ) but creates a temporary file which is automatically deleted when cp terminates.