Joey Hess 2006-02-19 sponge 1 sponge soak up standard input and write to a file sed '...' file | grep '...' | sponge file sponge reads standard input and writes it out to the specified file. Unlike a shell redirect, sponge soaks up all its input before opening the output file. This allows for constructing pipelines that read from and write to the same file. If no output file is specified, sponge outputs to stdout.