ed

ed is a standard, minimal and not a terribly intuitive text editor for Unix systems.

To open ed simply type the following:

$ed

This will open an empty file in ed. Since ed is generally silent with feedback start by typing ‘H’ and pressing enter. This way ed will print error messages when you do something wrong.

Note: Most commands in the following list can be run with a line number before the command to perform that action on that line.

Here are things you can do in the editor

• q - exit if the buffer is empty
• Q - exit unconditionally
• wfilename - write/save (overrides file if it exists)
• Wfilename - write/save (appends to the end of the file)
• a - start writing into the buffer, when you are done put a period . by itself
• p - print line
• n - print line and line number
• c - replace line
• d - delete line
• 6d - delete 6th line

A short example

$ed
H
a
Hello
World
.
n
2     World
1n
1     Hello
1d
n
1     World
w world.txt
6
q

End result is a text file named world.txt in the current directory.