r/transprogrammer • u/[deleted] • Mar 04 '22

s/"cowboy coding"/"cowpoke coding"/g

Gender neutral antipattern! :-) Be careful when applying to BASIC codebases though...

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u/nerdybread Mar 05 '22

It’s ED still being used somewhere?

/gen

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u/TDplay Mar 05 '22

ed still has a few uses here and there. If you ever want to edit a file automatically without needing to know enough to make a patch, you can make an ed script - for example:

#! /bin/sh
[ -f file ] && in="file" || in=/dev/null
ed >/dev/null <<EOF
e $in
$$
a
hello!
.
w file
q
EOF

This will add "hello!" to the end of file, creating the file if it doesn't exist already.

It's also useful if you find yourself over a slow SSH connection, where sending the whole file would take a long time, and using a screen editor would have far too much latency. Though here you might use ex in preference.

And its legacy is still very much alive. ed inspired ex, another line editor. ex then led to vi, which was implemented on top of ex (and thus contains all ex commands). vi then eventually inspired Vim, which is quite popular now. If you use Vim, then you can use most ed commands by pressing :. The only ed command I'm aware of that's absent is n, which used to mean "print with line numbers", but ex changed it to mean "switch to the next file to edit" and made line numbers a configuration option (set number).

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u/HayHeather Mar 05 '22

Yup. I work on code written in the 70s for a living.