ed.1 (2010 09)

ed(1) ed(1)

WARNINGS

ed(1) allows a Maximum Line Length of

4096 characters. Attempting to create lines longer than

the allowable limit causes

ed(1) to produce a

Line too long error message.

If a ﬁle contains lines longer than the speciﬁed limit (eg., 4096 characters), the longer lines will be trun-

cated to the stated maximum length. Saving the ﬁle will write the truncated version over the original ﬁle,

thus overwriting the original lines completely.

! command cannot be subject to a

g or a v command.

The

! command and the ! escape from the

e, r, and w commands cannot be used if the the editor is

invoked from a restricted shell (see sh(1)).

The sequence

\n in a regular expression does not match a newline character.

The

l command does not handle DEL correctly.

Files encrypted directly with the

crypt command with the null key cannot be edited (see crypt (1)).

If the editor input is coming from a command ﬁle (e.g.,

ed file < ed-cmd-file), the editor exits at

the ﬁrst failure of a command in the command ﬁle.

When reading a ﬁle,

ed discards ASCII NUL characters and all characters after the last newline. This

can cause unexpected behavior when using regular expressions to search for character sequences contain-

ing NUL characters or text near end-of-ﬁle.

AUTHOR

ed was developed by HP and OSF.

FILES

/tmp/ep Temporary buffer ﬁle where p is the process number.

ed.hup Work is saved here if the terminal is hung up.