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ed is actually really handy in shell scripts when you want change something in a text file, and want to navigate in the text by following landmarks. Eg. if you

by zurn 14y ago

ed is actually really handy in shell scripts when you want change something in a text file, and want to navigate in the text by following landmarks. Eg. if you are editing an .ini file the sed or awk methods are much more cumbersome, with ed it's just a couple of navigation commands and a in-place replace and save. Plus you get to try things out interactively and then paste the working set of commands in your script. it's like sed with a repl, only better! Example: https://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.shell/msg/e823e275906f4079 https://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.shell/msg/e823e275...

ultimoo 14y ago
This is really cool, thanks!
philh 14y ago
That breaks if the file to include contains a line with just a ., unfortunately. But it's still ridiculously simple, and that's likely not to be a problem in a lot of cases.