10 Jan
2020
10 Jan
'20
9:58 p.m.
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 09:13:04AM +0100, markus schnalke wrote:
I was quite shocked when I first realized that I had to do
`apt-get install ed' to have it available ... on a Unix-like
system. But on the other hand, who of today's users is even
capable of exiting it?!
For what it's worth, I regularly edit configuration files and shell
scripts using /bin/ed in environments where I can't use (due to
terminal limitations) or can't fit a more sophisticated editors.
These days this is typically in small appliance VM's.
I've also been known to do things like this in shell scripts[1]:
ed /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf <<EOF
/^server.document-root/s/^/#/p
/^index-file.names/s/^/#/p
/^include_shell.*create-mime/s/^/#/p
w
q
EOF
[1]
https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/kvm-xfstests/test-applian…
And for years, I knew how to exit ed and emacs, but had trouble
exiting vi. :-)
- Ted
On my own systems I like to install Heirlomm ed, which I have
outfactored from the Heirloom tools package. If you want to
actually use it every now and then, Gunnar's ed is much more
usable than GNU ed ... which seems to be more a demonstration
object than actually a programmer's editor.
Anyways, I'm having a great pleasure reading those historic
spotlights on editors these days. :-)
meillo