Advanced Commands: ed - Line Editor

Join the AI Workshop to learn more about AI and how it can be applied to web development. Next cohort February 1st, 2026

The AI-first Web Development BOOTCAMP cohort starts February 24th, 2026. 10 weeks of intensive training and hands-on projects.


ed is the original UNIX text editor, and it’s the most basic you can work with. It’s also very rarely used, if ever used, by most people.

Run it by typing ed. This starts an interactive session. Enter in write mode by typing a on a single line, and press enter. Then type everything you want, and once you are done, write just a dot (.) on a line and press enter.

Now type w followed by a file name to save the buffer to a file. It will return the number of bytes written to the file.

You can then press q to quit.

You can edit a file with ed by invoking it with the file name: ed <filename>. When you press a to add, you add content to the bottom of the file.

Inside an ed session you can type ,p to print the current file content.

Lessons in this unit:

0: Introduction
1: su - Switch User
2: sudo - Superuser Do
3: passwd - Change Password
4: ping - Test Network
5: traceroute - Trace Network Path
6: history - Command History
7: export - Set Environment Variables
8: crontab - Schedule Tasks
9: alias - Create Shortcuts
10: man - Manual Pages
11: tar - Archive Files
12: gzip - Compress Files
13: gunzip - Decompress Files
14: basename - Strip Directory
15: dirname - Extract Directory
16: nano - Text Editor
17: vim - Vi Improved Editor
18: emacs - Text Editor
19: ▶︎ ed - Line Editor
20: How to use Netcat
21: How to download a file from a server using the terminal