Ed Mastery: The Standard Unix Text Editor

by Michael Warren Lucas

“I’m glad someone’s finally giving ed the attention it deserves.” — Ken Thompson, co-creator of Unix®

Let me be perfectly clear: ed(1) is the standard Unix text editor. If you don’t know ed(1), you’re not a sysadmin. You’re a mere dabbler. A dilettante. Deficient.

Forty years after ed’s introduction, internationally acclaimed author Michael W Lucas has finally unlocked the mysteries of ed for everyone. With ed(1) Mastery, you too can become a proper sysadmin.

Ed Mastery will help you:
• understand buffers and addresses
• insert, remove, and mangle text
• master file management and shell escapes
• comprehend regular expressions, searches, and substitutions
• create high-performance scripts for transforming files

You must be at least this competent to use this computer. Read ed(1) Mastery today!

This edition uses feminine pronouns. See the other edition for masculine pronouns.

102 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2018

Reviews

[Christos Kontas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before reading this book, I thought I knew ed(1) pretty well. Well, with this tutorial, I learned some extra commands, but more importantly, the author shows some good patterns and practices on using every single command. It contains many, extensive examples on using ed(1), the standard UNIX editor.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sure, this was published on April 1st and is about a 40+ years old tool, but it's a) very entertaining and b) actually quite instructive. It'll teach you a lot about the origins of elements of more recent tools such as grep, sed, ex, and vi/vim.

[mirabilos]

I completely agree everyone should know how to use ed(1), the standard Unix text editor.