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| ex | |
|---|---|
| Original author | Bill Joy |
| Initial release | March 9, 1978; 47 years ago (1978-03-09) (as part of 1BSD) |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Unix |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Type | Text editor |
ex (short forextended)[1][2][better source needed] is aline editor forUnix systems originally written byBill Joy[3] in 1976, beginning with an earlier program written by Charles Haley.[4] Multiple implementations of the program exist; they are standardized byPOSIX.[5]
The original Unix editored was distributed with theBell Labs versions of the operating system in the 1970s. George Coulouris ofQueen Mary College, London, which had installed Unix in 1973, developed an improved version called em in 1975 that could take advantage ofvideo terminals.[6] While visiting Berkeley, Coulouris presented his program toBill Joy, who modified it to be less demanding on the processor; Joy's version became ex[7] and got included in theBerkeley Software Distribution.
ex was eventually given a full-screen visual interface (adding to its command line oriented operation), thereby becoming thevi text editor. In recent times, ex is implemented as a personality of the vi program; most variants of vi still have an "exmode", which is invoked using the commandex, or from within vi for one command by typing the: (colon) character. Although there is overlap between ex and vi functionality, some things can only be done with ex commands, so it remains useful when using vi.
The core ex commands which relate to search and replace are essential to vi. For instance, the ex command:%s/XXX/YYY/g replaces every instance ofXXX withYYY, and works in vi too. The% means every line in the file. The 'g' stands for global and means replace every instance on every line (if it was not specified, then only the first instance on each line would be replaced).
ex [-rR] [-s|-v] [-ccommand] [-ttagstring] [-wsize] [file...]
ex – Shell and Utilities Reference,The Single UNIX Specification, Version 5 fromThe Open Group
ex: text editor – Shell and Utilities Reference,The Single UNIX Specification, Version 5 fromThe Open Group| File system | |
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| Processes | |
| User environment | |
| Text processing | |
| Shell builtins | |
| Searching | |
| Documentation | |
| Software development | |
| Miscellaneous | |
