[ On Friday, April 26, 2002 at 06:36:14 (-0400), Thomas Mueller wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Terse device names 
>
> You might read through the man page for ed, slowly and carefully, in a half
> hour, but remembering everything when you need to edit a file in another matter.

Maybe my memory is better than average, but I don't recall having to
re-read the 'ed' tutorial until long after I'd edited many files and I
only did so then because I wanted to learn new tricks to make my use of
'ed' more efficient.

Of course that was a long time ago (~1980) and my memory of events back
then may be somewhat fuzzy; and by the time I encountered 'ed' I already
had a fair bit of experience with other simple line editors (BASIC
runtime systems), so the concepts were already embedded in my
understanding of things and all I had to learn were the particular
incantations necessary to make 'ed' function.

> I suppose you could make notes with pencil and paper, but then finding the
> needed paper in a big pile is another matter.  Problem is when booting the
> installation kernel from floppy disks or CD, or possibly DOSBOOT in the case of
> i386, NetBSD is single-tasking just like DOS, and to switch between the man
> page and the file you're editing, you need a second computer.

FYI, job control (i.e. the ability to suspend one program and run
another, i.e. suspend 'ed' and run 'man ed', is enabled even in single
user mode.

Or you could use a printer (i.e. print out the manual page), or keep
handy a copy of any of dozens of books that describe 'ed' or contain a
copy of its manual page....

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods@acm.org>;  <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;  <woods@robohack.ca>
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