this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Somehow, despite being the standard it doesn't come installed by default in any distro I've tried.
They all insist you use
sed... that bloated thing!ed and sed arre different things. One edits files in place, interactively. The other edits streams i.e.batch processing.
ed is the precursor to vi. Similar commands. It's just you can only work on one line at a time.
You want
sed -i -f -ed is also the precursor of sed, and of some other dozen of commands.
Yes ed begat sed, but sed works differently. It didn't replace ed. It did a different job.
Ed loads the file into a buffer which you edit in a random access fashion and then save. Sed collects a list of commands and then streams the file line by line, executing the commands as they match lines. In your example nothing happens until you've entered the whole editing script.
I love the way they are selling this
https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html
If your system has vi or a clone, try
vi -e, or, if the symlink is set up,ex. Technically that's vi inexmode, notedper-se but it's about as similar as you're going to get without a lot of pointless bother.is that vim's evil mode?
Comparison time!
exis toedasnanois topicoThat is, it's an editor that works in almost exactly the same way as the original, but it's by somebody else.
exis toviasviis tovim, or C to C++.That is, the latter grew out of and improved upon the former, but you can still use them like their forerunners if you really want, which is why
vihas anexmode and why you can still use pointers in C++ if you're sufficiently warped.and how does qed, ed, ex and sed and grep relate to nano micro and pico in comparison? 🤔
qedwas also a line editor but pre-dated and inspireded, so that'spicotonanooredtoexagain, just even further back in time.sedandgrepgrew out of commands withined(or equivalent) so I guess you could say they're each kind of a knight's move two to the side and once backward from the direction ofextovi. Backwards because they're simpler, but two to the side because they're not interactive.As to what would be "backward but one to the side" in that analogy, that'd be something like a tool that asked questions about every line in a file and made changes accordingly. I don't think there's any such standard tool, but I can think of at least a couple of ways to write one.
It's like nano Vs the original pico