Raymii.org

Table of Contents

• Navigating
• Editing
• Printing
• Buffer operations
• Searching / replace
• Regular expresions
• Reading and writing

ed is a line editor for the Unix operating system. It was one of the first end-user programs hosted on the system and has been standard in Unix-based systems ever since. ed was originally written in PDP-11/20 assembler by Ken Thompson in 1971.

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Download the PDF cheatsheet

Navigating

• Line number: go to that line and print it.
• pn - Print current line and line number.
• 3kxe - mark line 3 as "xe".
• 'xep - print the line marked as xe.

Editing

• a - start editing after the current line.
• i - start editing before the current line.
• c - replace the current line.
• end the editing with only a period on a line (.).
• 1d - delete line 1.
• 1,2j - join line one and two.

Printing

• 1,$p - print entire buffer.
  • ,p - also prints the entire buffer.
• 2,3p - print lines 2 and 3.
• .,4p - print from the current line (.) to line 4.
• -1,+1p - print 1 line above and 1 line below the current line.

Buffer operations

• 2t4 - Copy line 2 to after line 4.
• 2t$ - Copy line 2 to the end of the file.
• 3m6 - Move line 3 to after line 6.
• 2,4m$ - Move lines 2 to 4 to the end of the file.

Searching / replace

• /like - Move to the next line after the current one matching regular expression /like.
• ?Like - Search backwards.
• 1s/re/jo - Substitute only the first occurence of re with jo on line 1.
• 1s/re/jo/g - Substitute all occurences of re with jo on line 1.
• 1,$s/re/jo/g - Substitute all occurences of re with jo in the whole buffer.

Regular expresions

• g/re/p - print all the lines matching regular expression /re/.
• v/re/p - print all the lines NOT matching regular expression /re/.
• g/re/m$ - move all the lines matching regular expression /re/ to the end of the file.

Reading and writing

• w file.txt - Save the current buffer as filename file.txt.
• w - Save the current buffer if the file is already saved.
• w1,4 - Save lines 1 to 4 to the current buffer.
• W - append to a file (not replace).
• r /etc/hosts - Insert the contents of /etc/hosts after the current line.
• r !ps -e - Insert the output of the command "ps -e" after the current line.
• e file.txt - Open the file file.txt and replace the current buffer.

Tags: cheatsheet , ed , pdf , tutorials , unix-editor