Hi Tim, > PeterMerchant wrote: > > edlin on DOS boxes.
I've never used Edlin, and hardly used DOS/Windows, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin suggests it's far inferior to its predecessor ed(1). No regular expressions, no symbolic names, ‘marks’, for lines, no ‘global’ command, e.g. ‘g/foo[0-9]/s/bar/xyzzy/’ to run the substitute command, changing the first ‘bar’ to ‘xyzzy’, on every line containing ‘foo’ followed by a digit. > I remember reading the CP/M ed manual in horror in the early 1980's > (on a home-built Nascom II which I still have), wondering why they'd > still provide anything so primitive! But then used edlin for a couple > of years on early PC's developing in assembler and C. I found http://www.cpm.z80.de/randyfiles/DRI/ED.pdf and CP/M ED seems a lot better than Edlin. I see it maintains a cursor position within a line; do you recall how this was shown when a line was typed? Perhaps it wasn't and one had to mentally track it, using ‘0T’ and ‘1T’ to confirm. It's nice multiple commands can be strung together, only executed on Enter. No regular expressions or marks for lines though, and the closest it gets to ed's ‘global’ is ‘nM’ to repeat the rest of the command line ‘n’ times. Amusing how it copes with large files and the small memory buffer by having the user say when lines at the start of the buffer can be flushed out to the new file, and when some more of the source file can be appended to the buffer. -- Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: BEC, Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2019-08-06 20:00 Check to whom you are replying Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread, don't hijack: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk
