ed - quoting control characters?

Question

How can I search for control characters in unix ed(1)?

For example

ed somefile.log <<EOF
1,$s/.*\015//
w
q
EOF

doesn't work. Neither does \r. Obviously sed(1), awk(1) and other editors can do this, however ed has the very useful line move (m) command which is all I need within the bash script I am using.

I am able to accomplish what I want within the script by entering the control character directly (escaping it with C-v in vi, C-q in emacs for example), but this means that binary characters must be present in my otherwise printable text script.

ed Transport2SVN-W0177.log <<EOF
g/^M/s/.*^M//p
w
q
EOF

The ^M is actually character 0x0d.

Are you sure that you are running this from a windows console? The [batch-file] Tag mention this — jeb, Sep 07 '16 at 14:33
Removed batch-file tag. Ed is invoked from shell script and is the unix ed. — Rumbleweed, Sep 07 '16 at 14:39

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 08 '18 at 12:40

ed doesn't provide any support for converting control characters.

The way you have found of inserting control-characters directly into the script (using Ctrl-V at the keyboard) is portable and it works.

It's possible that particular implementations of ed might support this, but it would not be portable.

ed - quoting control characters?

1 Answers1