I wondered this too so looked at the man page [1] > Unlike a shell redirect, sponge soaks up all its input before opening the output file. This allows constric

I wondered this too so looked at the man page [1] > Unlike a shell redirect, sponge soaks up all its input before opening the output file. This allows constricting pipelines that read from and write to the same file. [1] https://linux.die.net/man/1/sponge https://linux.die.net/man/1/sponge