From the course: Linux Tips

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Working with text: ed 101

Working with text: ed 101 - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux Tips

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Working with text: ed 101

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- [Instructor] Ed is a command line editor with a long history on Unix systems. And while most people, today, don't use it, if you're interested in a little Unix archeology, or just in using minimal tools where they're available, it's interesting to explore. Ed is sometimes used in scripts to make programmatic changes to files. And, while you can use it interactively to edit files, it's not the friendliest thing to use. In fact, Linguist and Computer Historian Peter H. Salus once called it the most user-hostile editor ever created. And, while strictly speaking, we could make life a little harder for ourselves by editing a file in binary or something, he's not far from the mark. Ed works differently than most text editors we're used to, in part because it's from a time when computers didn't always have screens where we could navigate around a text file visually, in order to make changes. In this era, it wasn't uncommon to have…

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