Hi Andrew and all - I just happened to see this thread. Sorry to be
chiming in late.
I would never claim any smarts, but I still find -l extremely useful. I
use it every day. The idea was, and still is, to be able to run ed
interactively as the editor for crontabs.
In that case, if I mistype a search or whatever "failed" operation,
which causes ed's exit status to be nonzero, I still want a zero exit
status, because it doesn't affect the crontab contents and I want my new
edits to be saved anyway. "Real" errors, like a failed write, still
exit nonzero. In my experience, the behavior Antonio implemented for
--loose-exit-status is exactly what is desirable.
In other words, I am human, I make plenty of mistakes, but when those
mistakes are inconsequential, I don't want to have to redo the edits
(perfectly) for them to take effect.
setting EDITOR='ed -l' breaks when ed doesn't recognize option `-l'
Sure, but setting EDITOR correctly is my problem, not yours.
In short, please don't kill -l. I don't advocate standardizing it, but
please don't forbid it. Then GNU ed can continue to provide it and not
be "against" the standard or have to consider it "deprecated". That
would be painful for me, and, as far as I can see, gratuitous.
Thanks,
Karl
