Ed - A line-oriented text editor

Introduction

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 For most purposes, however, it is superseded by full-screen editors such as GNU Emacs or GNU Moe.

Documentation

The manual is available in the info system of the GNU Operating System. Use info to access the top level info page. Use info ed to access the ed section directly.

An online manual for ed can be found at manual/ed_manual.html.

Download

The latest released version of GNU ed can be found at http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ed/ or in the subdirectory /gnu/ed/ on your favorite GNU mirror. For other ways to obtain ed, please read How to get GNU Software. The latest released version will be the most recent version available at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ed/.

To decompress ed tarballs you may need lzip from http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html. Then use "tar -xf ed[version].tar.lz" or "lzip -cd ed[version].tar.lz | tar -xf -" to extract the files.

Old versions and testing versions can be found at http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/ed/.

How to get help

For general discussion of errors (bugs) in ed, the mailing list bug-ed@gnu.org is the most appropriate forum. Please send messages as plain text. Please do not send messages encoded as HTML nor encoded as base64 nor included as multiple formats. Please include a descriptive subject line with the word "ed" in it.

An archive of the bug report mailing list is available at http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ed.

How to help

To contact the maintainer, either to report an error (bug) or to contribute fixes or improvements, send mail to bug-ed@gnu.org. Please send messages as plain text. If posting patches they should be in unified diff format against the latest version. They should include a text description.

If you know someone who is using gzip, bzip2, or xz, please tell him/her about the advantages of switching to lzip. See this comparison of the formats, and this comparison of the tools.

See also the ed project page at Savannah.

Licensing

Ed is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

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Updated: $Date: 2024/12/07 18:46:00 $ $Author: antonio $

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