Wow, it's like I was traveling in a time machine back to 70's and saw Ken Thompson hacking. One thing that has always taken for granted is that vi is the ubiquitous editor in Unix world, it's NOT true, :)
I think this is when you learn that ed is truly the ubiquitous editor. None of these fancy visual editors like vi, also if the date is to be believed, this predates vi by a year (1976 is when Joy created it if I remember right).
Also, I just realized its been a long time since I had to use ed, but this is fun. Its like a more civilized age of unix, ls -l doesn't print groups. So much fun to be had here.
I tried vi and edit commands and they didn't work. Thanks for this hint about ed. Works in the this pdp emulator.
Out of curiosity I also tried ed on my Ubuntu and it works here too. Shouldn't obsolete tools like these be removed from the newer linux kernels? Or is there a significant population that still uses it directly or indirectly (using some tools that use ed)?
I think I first started using UNIX around 1986. Always thought that DOS was a poor mans rip off of UNIX. Needless say this emulator is a major treat. I actually used to play "Hunt the Wumpus" with a buddy of mine way back when.
As for "should obsolete tools be removed" no! Everything in UNIX is built upon something else. You could and still can build the most useful shell scripts to support whatever task. Treat UNIX commands like any computer programming langaue commands and you have tools.
Just a week ago I'm using dd to convert old IBM mainframe from "EBCDIC" to "ASCII" data. Followed that up by writing some C language code to process packed decimal data.
All in All *NIX is the most useful command line platform there is!
There are a lot of these ancient tools around. For example, you probably have "rcs", which is a precursor of cvs. Rumors are, there are tools (wikis), which use it.
> Shouldn't obsolete tools like these be removed from the newer linux kernels?
It isn't in the kernel. That's the point: It's just one small file on the hard drive, which barely takes up anyone's resources. It's trivial.
> Or is there a significant population that still uses it directly or indirectly (using some tools that use ed)?
We don't know. What we do know is that if an established distro suddenly released a version without any tools older than a certain date, it would result a political mess that would be a lot worse than any benefits the distro maintainers could get from removing a few files from their distro.
ed is the standard text editor - used to say so in its manpage, too.
I own a Unix book in which the authors dismiss vi as too bloated to be usable ("you need a large PDP-11 for it to fit into memory and still have room for an actual text to edit") and having too many features for anyone to need.
/usr/ken
# vi
vi: not found
Wow, it's like I was traveling in a time machine back to 70's and saw Ken Thompson hacking. One thing that has always taken for granted is that vi is the ubiquitous editor in Unix world, it's NOT true, :)