ed Cheat Sheet

ed is a small, powerful, line-oriented, command-line-interfaced text editor. All editors frustrate, but ed often amazes while others disappoint.

ed, man! !man ed — ed is the standard text editor.

“man ed” for more information.

Start ed from your shell command line:

“ed file”

Edit file by entering ed commands with the following syntax:

“[range][command]”

range specifies the line or block of consecutive lines (syntax: “from-line,to-line”) to which command is applied. Default range is the current line except where noted below with a parenthesis preceding the command syntax. Lines are specified as follows:

n	line n	“.”	current	“$”	last	“'”c	mark c
“-”[n]	up n (default: 1)	“+”[n]	down n (default: 1)	“,”	1,$	“;”	.,$
“?re?”	previous regexp match				“/re/”	next regexp match

Input commands

“a”

Append after.

“c”

Change range.

“i”

Insert before.

“.”

End input mode.

Edit commands

“d”	Delete.	"s/re/s/[g\|n][p]"	Substitute.
“m[line]”	Move after line.	“t[line]”	Copy after line.
“(.,+)j”	Join lines.	“u”	Undo.
“(1,$)g/re/cmds”	Perform cmds for all matching lines.	“(1,$)v/re/cmds”	Perform cmds for all non-matching lines.

File commands

“e [file^*]”	Edit file.	“E [file^*]”	Edit, discarding changes.
“($)r [file]”	Read and append.	“f [file]”	Set/display file name.
“(1,$)w [file^*]”	Write.	“(1,$)W [file^*]”	Append to file.
“(1,$)wq [file^*]”	Write and quit.

^*	In place of file, specify “”!“shell-command” to read/write text to shell-command standard output/input.

Display commands

“p”	List lines.	“l”	… with unprintables.	“n”	… with numbers.
“(+)z[lines]”	Scroll.	“(+)null”	“p”

Other commands

“kc”	Mark line.	“($)=”	Display line number.	“h”	Last error text.
“!shell-command”	Execute shell-command.	“q”	Quit.	“Q”	Quit, discarding changes.

$Id: ed.html,v 1.5 2007/10/09 00:27:11 papa Exp $