Greg A. Woods wrote:

> Learning the shell well teaches more about about programming, but
> learning 'ed' well teaches some quite fundamental things about
> applications and data, as well as practical things about using basic
> regular expressions effectively, etc.
> 

I'm still not very convinced but this isn't very important so let's just 
forget about (if it's for regex, vi, emacs, sed, perl/python/*, ... are 
better as  learning tools than ed in my opinion. if it's for terminals, 
one can go for more/cat/..., if it's for filesystems, cp/ln/rm/mv/..., 
etc etc...).

> It's too bad /usr/share/doc/usd/09.edtut is empty in NetBSD
> distributions....  A half hour reading through that paper, even without
> a live computer to work through the examples with, would give you a good
> head-start on learning "ed".

/usr/share/doc seems to have been abandoned (I find it surprising to see 
that some docs have disappeared).

> 
> (there's no political or legal excuse I can see for this (and other
> similar) documents being missing from NetBSD any more -- they've been
> freely available for years)

Fully agreed. I see no reason why many files have disappeared from  the 
shardocs dir. storage is no reason, since their size is ridiculous 
compared to that of sys/arch/foo (among other parts). At worst, they can 
be converted into a pkg. but this is probably a maintenance issue though...

> Of course since it is freely avaliable you can find it (or at least its
> troff source) elsewhere:
> 
> 	http://cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/vol2/edtut.bun
> 
> Then when you're done with that one the next step is this one:
> 
> 	http://cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/vol2/adv.ed.bun
> 
> Luckily both papers can be found in the following ready-to-read version:
> 
> 	http://cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/v7vol2a.pdf

thanks for the pointers. I'll try to get myself better chances to die 
with a lower ignorance level:)