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The GNU ed line editor
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This manual is for GNU ed (version 1.15, 1 January 2019).


   GNU ed is a line-oriented text editor. It is used to create, display,
modify and otherwise manipulate text files, both interactively and via
shell scripts. A restricted version of ed, red, can only edit files in
the current directory and cannot execute shell commands. Ed is the
'standard' text editor in the sense that it is the original editor for
Unix, and thus widely available. For most purposes, however, it is
superseded by full-screen editors such as GNU Emacs or GNU Moe.

Overview

Overview of the 'ed' command

Introduction to line editing

Getting started with GNU 'ed'

Invoking ed

Command line interface

Line addressing

Specifying lines/ranges in the buffer

Regular expressions

Patterns for selecting text

Commands

Commands recognized by GNU 'ed'

Limitations

Intrinsic limits of GNU 'ed'

Diagnostics

GNU 'ed' error handling

Problems

Reporting bugs

GNU Free Documentation License

How you can copy and share this manual

   Copyright (C) 1993, 1994, 2006-2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

   Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.