This is timely - I wrote an ed guide today and this post is a good opportunity to share it. I've been working on a remote server via ILO-in-a-browser with broke

This is timely - I wrote an ed guide today and this post is a good opportunity to share it. I've been working on a remote server via ILO-in-a-browser with broken console definitions and a screen that's too small for the interface. It's a gift - I've wanted to be fluent in ed for a long time and spent the time to get there today. If anyone has something similar for console-mode sam usage I'd love to know that too. Anyway - the guide: Ed doesn't push any of the fancy cruft that modern editors do - full screen views of the text in question or fiddly mouse interfaces. It is line based, scriptable, it works *everywhere* that unix runs, and the default configuration is predictable. A true power tool from the days of yore when men were men and each tool did one simple thing extremely well. How to get into ed and create some text: <pre> $ touch my_filename $ ed my_filename 0 a Here is some text next line more yet more The dot on the next line indicates I'm done inserting text. Then save and exit. . w q $ </pre> Basic commands: * a: append to the first line * p: print the current line * n: print the current line with a line number (handy) * %n: list all lines * 1n: list line one * 1,5n: line lines one to five * 5,$n: list lines five until the end * 2d: delete line two * 3,4j: merge lines 3 and 4 * 2i: insert text to a new line before the current line 2 * P: enable prompt * %l: - that's a lower-case letter after 'k' not the number one. Print all lines, including end-of-line markers (useful in dos2unix settings among others). Regular expressions (this is where it gets exciting): * 2s/next/another/: change the word 'next' on line two do 'another' (don't forget that trailing slash) * g/e/: find all the lines containing the letter 'e' * g/e/n: find all the lines containing the letter 'e' and then print them out with their line number next to them. * %s/e/q/: change the first instance of the letter 'e' to 'q' on all lines * %s/e/q/g: change all instances of the letter 'e' to 'q' on all lines * 1,5s/e/q/3: change the third instance of the letter 'e' to 'q' on all lines * %v/for/n: print out the lines that do NOT contain the word 'for' Other magic: * 1,4y: cut ('yank') lines 1 to 4 * 5x: paste to after line 5 * 1,3t6: Transfers lines one to three to a position after line 6.