[H-GEN] Simple Linux editors

[Greg Black]

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Jason Henry Parker wrote:

| Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:
| 
| > To put this into perspective, I think it's worth making the
| > point that ed is often the only tool available for emergency
| > editing and that no competent sys admin (or programmer) will be
| > troubled at the thought of using it.
| 
| [snip great argument and wonderful set of examples]
| 
| Well, everyone has their hammer, it would appear.  I can remember
| making an ed script to run as a -exec argument to a find, once; I
| think I wanted to insert boilerplate text (a license?) into a set of
| header files.  I can't remember why I didn't simply use Perl;.

I have often used ed with find (and found it most useful, with
apologies for the bad pun).  Often, those emergency situations
that I spoke of earlier would also preclude use of Perl (or awk
or Python, to mention my preferred alternatives).

| That said, you're also talking to the man who installed emacs on a
| remote but well-connected machine just to get ediff-mode to make some
| merges on a critically important configuration file.

I have installed emacs (version 17) on machines where it took 20
minutes to load just so I could do some clever trick with it.
But I've also owned a number of Unix boxes and worked with a
greater number of Unix boxes where it was simply impossible to
get emacs to build, never mind run.  And, of course, there are
still the times when /usr is hosed and you need an editor ...

Anyway, I've either made my point or failed.  Further verbiage
from me is not likely to convert anybody, so I'll (try to) shut
up now.

Greg

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