ed editor

I just want to briefly touch on the ed editor. Because the vi editor was derived from the ed editor, after you understand ed, vi operates much the same way. The ed editor is strictly a line editor, which means you edit a file line by line, whereas vi is a full-screen editor.

The ed utility operates on a copy of the file it is editing; changes made to the copy have no effect on the file until a w (write) command is given. The copy of the text being edited resides in a temporary file called the buffer. There is only one buffer.

The ed utility supports a limited form of regular expression notation. Regular expressions are used in addresses to specify lines and in some commands (for example, s) to specify portions of a line that are to ...

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