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Re: ed proposal - multiple files on command line
From: |
John Cowan |
Subject: |
Re: ed proposal - multiple files on command line |
Date: |
Fri, 10 Nov 2006 02:02:04 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.3.28i |
Paul Jackson scripsit:
> I would like to add a feature to ed(1) - the ability to
> edit multiple command line specified files in a single
> ed invocation.
+1
> It's very non-intrusive -- if you don't attempt the command
> 'e %', then nothing is changed. And if you invoke 'e %', but
> haven't named multiple files on the command line, it still
> behaves just like before -- tries to edit a file named '%'.
I like the feature, but not the syntax. "%" in ex means
"this file", not "the next file".
Unfortunately, the n command means something different in
ed (ed's n is ex's #), or we could use that. How about
":n"? That is ex-compatible, because ex ignores leading
colons in command lines.
> Any comments? Anyone out there (besides me) even still use ed
> as your main editor?
I'd like to use ed, but there are just enough features that ex has that
ed does not, that I can't, quite. These are:
! with a range to process a range of lines through a command;
ex-style variant of the join command, handling whitespace well (in the
POSIX locale, when the last character on the first line of a pair of lines
to be joined is a period, two space characters will be added following the
period; when the last character of the first line is a blank character
or when the first character on the second line of the pair is a ")",
no space characters will be added; otherwise, one space character will
be added following the last character of the first line; extra blank
characters at the start of a line will be discarded);
> and < commands to indent and unindent, with multiple ones allowed.
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