ed - A line-oriented text editor

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Introduction

GNU ed is a line-oriented text editor. It is used to create, display, modify and otherwise manipulate text files, both interactively and via shell scripts. A restricted version of ed, red, can only edit files in the current directory and cannot execute shell commands. Ed is the "standard" text editor in the sense that it is the original editor for Unix, and thus widely available. For most purposes, however, it is superseded by full-screen editors such as GNU Emacs or GNU Moe.

Documentation

The manual is available in the info system of the GNU Operating System. Use info to access the top level info page. Use info ed to access the ed section directly.

Downloading

Released versions of GNU ed can be found in the subdirectory /gnu/ed/ on your favorite GNU mirror. For other ways to obtain ed, please read How to get GNU Software. The latest released version will be the latest version available here at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ed/.

Old versions (and sometimes the latest version if upload to http://ftp.gnu.org/ gets delayed for some reason) can be found at http://savannah.gnu.org/download/ed/.

Testing versions of alpha releases can be found on the alpha release server. A different server is used for alpha releases so that people do not confuse testing snapshots and released versions. Alpha test versions are available at ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/ed/.

How to Get Help

For general discussion of bugs in ed the mailing list bug-ed@gnu.org is the most appropriate forum. Please send messages as plain text. Please do not send messages encoded as HTML nor encoded as base64 MIME nor included as multiple formats. Please include a descriptive subject line. If all of the subject are "bug in ed" it is impossible to differentiate them.

An archive of the bug report mailing list is available at http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ed.

How to Help

To contact the maintainers, either to report a bug or to contribute fixes or improvements, send mail to bug-ed@gnu.org. Please send messages as plain text. If posting patches they should be in unified diff format against the latest alpha testing version. They should include a text description and the unified diff inline in the message and not attached to it.
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Updated: $Date: 2008/04/11 17:59:25 $ $Author: antonio $