I lost a Geek Purity Point today

10 February 2006

Today I realized that a bug in a certain shell script, which involved the output of a sort command being in almost but not quite the right order, could be fixed with the judicious use of ed.

The scary thing is, this is the second time I’ve resorted to ed in my profession. The first time was a few years ago, when I was trying to analyze some file that was too large to fit in Emacs.

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, ed is the standard text editor. Accept no substitutes.

• Later: Star-cancelled lovers
• Earlier: We value your opinions…