• Nemo Wuming@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The original “ed” text editor, from 1969 Unix. Everyone should spend a few days trying to get some work done with it, if only to appreciate how we have nicer things now.

    • Ramin Honary@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Another nice thing about ed is that it is sometimes easier to use than sed when you want to edit a file programmatically, since you can navigate lines at random (forward and backward directions), and you can still run regex find/replace like with sed. Just

      printf 'i\nstring of ed commands\n.\n' | ed file-to-edit.txt
      

      and pipe the commands into ed, although it is really an esoteric way to write scripts.