ex (text editor)

ex
Original author(s)	Bill Joy
Initial release	March 9, 1978; 46 years ago (1978-03-09) (as part of 1BSD)
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Text editor

ex, short for EXtended,^[1]^[2]^{[better source needed]} is a line editor for Unix systems originally written by Bill Joy^[3] in 1976, beginning with an earlier program written by Charles Haley.^[4] Multiple implementations of the program exist; they are standardized by POSIX.^[5]

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Transcription

History

The original Unix editor, distributed with the Bell Labs versions of the operating system in the 1970s, was the rather user-unfriendly ed. George Coulouris of Queen Mary College, London, which had installed Unix in 1973, developed an improved version called em in 1975 that could take advantage of video terminals.^[6] While visiting Berkeley, Coulouris presented his program to Bill Joy, who modified it to be less demanding on the processor; Joy's version became ex^[7] and got included in the Berkeley Software Distribution.

ex was eventually given a full-screen visual interface (adding to its command line oriented operation), thereby becoming the vi text editor. In recent times, ex is implemented as a personality of the vi program; most variants of vi still have an "ex mode", which is invoked using the command ex, or from within vi for one command by typing the : (colon) character. Although there is overlap between ex and vi functionality, some things can only be done with ex commands, so it remains useful when using vi.

Relation to vi

The core ex commands which relate to search and replace are essential to vi. For instance, the ex command :%s/XXX/YYY/g replaces every instance of XXX with YYY, and works in vi too. The % means every line in the file. The 'g' stands for global and means replace every instance on every line (if it was not specified, then only the first instance on each line would be replaced).

Command-line invocation

Synopsis

ex [-rR] [-s|-v] [-c command] [-t tagstring] [-w size] [file...]

Options

-r: recover specified files after a system crash
-R: sets readonly
-s: (XPG4 only) suppresses user-interactive feedback
-v: invoke visual mode (vi)
-c command: Execute command on first buffer loaded from file. May be used up to ten times.
-t tagstring: Edit the file containing the specified tag
-w size: Set window size
-: (obsolete) suppresses user-interactive feedback
-l: Enable lisp editor mode
-x: Use encryption when writing files
-C: encryption option
file: The name(s) of the file(s) to be edited

References

^ vi editor history:ex
^ "A Brief History of Vim:1976". Archived from the original on 2021-06-05. Retrieved 2021-06-05.
^ ex manual page
^ William N. Joy, Ex reference manual, November, 1977
^ ex – Shell and Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification, Version 4 from The Open Group
^ George Coulouris: Bits of History
^ Salus, Peter H. (2005). The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin. Groklaw.

External links

The Wikibook Guide to Unix has a page on the topic of: Commands

ex: text editor – Shell and Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification, Version 4 from The Open Group

v t e Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins
File system	cat chattr chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fuser ln ls mkdir mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask
Processes	at bg crontab fg kill nice ps time
User environment	env exit logname mesg talk tput uname who write
Text processing	awk basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fold head iconv join m4 more nl paste patch printf read sed sort strings tail tr troff uniq vi wc xargs
Shell builtins	alias cd echo test unset wait
Searching	find grep
Documentation	man
Software development	ar ctags lex make nm strip yacc
Miscellaneous	bc cal expr lp od sleep true and false
Categories Standard Unix programs Unix SUS2008 utilities List

This page was last edited on 22 March 2024, at 22:43

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