41–50 of 92 posts
Monday is a "Ride to work day" for motorcyclists. I think this same thinking should be applied to ed! Think of it: One day, every year, there should be a "Use ed (the standard editor) day". On that day, all your text editing must happen with 'ed'. Who's with me?
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I'm with you!
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quit
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exit
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qI'm glad ed is there. I'm glad articles like this are there. But there is no way I'll have retained that article in the moment my terminal has borked and I actually need ed. I wish that something like this available in the man pages, or something like them, or at least referred to in them. Because maybe I'm not clever enough but I don't find the man page articles to be very good introductions. As reminders of syntax…
On many systems you should be able to unbork the terminal with 'reset' or 'tput reset'. Then you do not need ed ;)
If you’re using any Unix at all, then ed really will always be there, no matter how old or limited the system. So as it turns out, my Arch Linux setup does not actually have ed.
They did specify Unix.
I'm glad ed is there. I'm glad articles like this are there. But there is no way I'll have retained that article in the moment my terminal has borked and I actually need ed. I wish that something like this available in the man pages, or something like them, or at least referred to in them. Because maybe I'm not clever enough but I don't find the man page articles to be very good introductions. As reminders of syntax…
That was a good explanation. I hope never to have to use ed.
One situation where I always use 'ed' is when I reinstall a machine (with the same ip) and ssh tells me the keys don't match together with the line number in the file known_hosts. It's easy as: #ed ~/.ssh/known_hosts 15d wq
(assuming the mismatching line was 15). Only sed would be faster if it wasn't for the time spent always looking up the "-i" (edit in place) flag, so I just use ed.
Also knowing a little 'ed' will make working with 'vi' easier, assuming 'vi' is not your usual editor.
If you’re using any Unix at all, then ed really will always be there, no matter how old or limited the system. So as it turns out, my Arch Linux setup does not actually have ed.
> Arch Linux setup does not actually have ed. They did specify Unix.
Having been a user of *NIX for over 20 years and a professional Systems Administrator for over 10, I have never once had a reason to use ed. Even the smallest embedded environments usually have some variant of vi available. The only time that I've needed to use ed was edlin in the dark days of early MS-DOS, which is very similar. This is borderline masochistic.
An editor in need is an editor indeed!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? We have better alternatives, and clearly things can work without it.
What better alternatives are there? Even if you prefer vi for interactive edits, I still prefer ed for small edits. Then there are times when your terminal is borken (or as somebody mentioned, perhaps even your keyboard is broken), this still happens more often than you think. Recently I had to use some ajax-term thing which was just awful and completely unable to run vi properly for who knows what reason, anything t…
If your terminal is broken, there are plenty of ways (reset, stty sane, whatever) to fix that. I'm also not sure why having an extra binary on my system is a good safety guard against a broken keyboard.
The ajax term case is valid I guess, though I'm not sure how common that is. I was in a case like that a year or so ago and ended up using cat and sed to get the thing back on the network.
Having been a user of *NIX for over 20 years and a professional Systems Administrator for over 10, I have never once had a reason to use ed. Even the smallest embedded environments usually have some variant of vi available. The only time that I've needed to use ed was edlin in the dark days of early MS-DOS, which is very similar. This is borderline masochistic.