Re: GNU ed 1.20 released

[Andrew Moore]

Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:
] I am pleased to announce the release of GNU ed 1.20.

GNU ed can now be used again as a systemd editor. Hurrah! Thank you!
One suggestion: it might be helpful, in addition to setting dot, to
print dot. In the particular case of `systemctl edit`, the user
doesn't manually invoke `ed +4 ...', so it's easy to assume that dot
is at the end of file. Even printing a blank line in this case can
be a helpful reminder.

Regarding filenames, Unix allows nearly any character in a filename.
I'm curious what prompted you to handle control characters specially?

A minor issue with the f command is that the following works:

ed -p '*' --unsafe-names $'filename\nwith\nnewlines'
*f
filename\012with\012newlines
*

But trying to set such a filename with the f command doesn't seem to:

*f hello^V^Jworld
hello
?
*f
hello
*f hello\012world
*w
0
*!ls
hello\012world
!
*f hello\
world
*f
helloworld
*

Finally, I agree that gratuitously creating directories is a footgun.
It's easy enough for an ed user to create target directories with:

*!mkdir -p new/path
!
*

Perhaps the error message when attempting to write to a non-existent
directory could be improved instead?
-AM