On Sat, May 05, 2007 at 08:58:49AM +0200, Lasse Hiller?e Petersen wrote:
> Poor man's cat:
> while read l ; do echo $l ; done <filein >fileout
> 
> Now, what is a good candidate for poor man's ed?

Not that I've ever tried to do this, but if your shell happened to be bash,
then you could re-phrase your cat as:

while read l; do echo ${l/pattern/substitute}; done <filein >fileout

to give you something like a sed.  Unfortunately our shell can't do that, but
you might be able to get by on a case-by-case process with a combination of
line splitting and/or prefix/suffix substitution and counting (arithmetic
expansion).

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew