this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I see. I guess what confused me was that i didn't understand what addresses were.
Thank you for your explanations :)
Yeah no problem.
What's maybe interesting is how
sed
came to be. Back in early days of Unix, they haded
as their editor (or, as some old manpage says, "Ed is the standard text editor.")Sed has basically the same commands as ed. You typed
3d
to delete the third line, or10,20p
to print lines 10 to 20. They only had teletypes back then, which are basically a keyboard and dot-matrix printer with one of those continuous papers for output, prior to when hardware terminals with CRT screens were a thing.Anyway, someone thought it would be useful if you could put ed-style editing commands inside shell pipelines, and ed doesn't work for that. It is used for interactively editing files in place, and so gets commands from stdin. You can't pipe any files into it. So the "stream editor", sed, was born.
Also interesting: There were improved modified versions of ed going around like em and later ex. The original vi was a "visual mode" extension for ex, and you can still run ex/ed commands from vi by typing
:
first, e.g. you can delete line 3 by typing:3d
inside vi.12 days late, but thanks for the bit of history, I always enjoy this stuff :)