Editing with vi and ed

Abstract

Text editing is a fundamental activity under any operating system, for the excellent reason that every user must be able to create and modify files. Editors serve a variety of purposes ranging from program preparation to the writing of books, tasks which cannot all be best fulfilled by the same software package even though those provided under Unix come surprisingly close to being universal. Although many different editors run under the Unix system, the most common ones, capable of handling an incredibly wide range of tasks, are vi and ed. They are described in this chapter in some detail. Others of potential use to a wide circle of Unix users include sed and awk batch-run programs capable of systematic alteration of text at a sophisticated level; these will not be discussed in this chapter.