Ex Reference Manual
Version 3.7

William Joy

Mark Horton

Computer Science Division
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, Ca. 94720

ABSTRACT

Ex a line oriented text editor, which supports both command and display oriented editing. This reference manual describes the command oriented part of ex; the display editing features of ex are described in An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi. Other documents about the editor include the introduction Edit: A tutorial, the Ex/edit Command Summary, and a Vi Quick Reference card.

Table of Contents

• 1. Starting ex
• 2. File manipulation
  • 2.1. Current file
  • 2.2. Alternate file
  • 2.3. Filename expansion
  • 2.4. Multiple files and named buffers
  • 2.5. Read only
• 3. Exceptional Conditions
  • 3.1. Errors and interrupts
  • 3.2. Recovering from hangups and crashes
• 4. Editing modes
• 5. Command structure
  • 5.1. Command parameters
  • 5.2. Command variants
  • 5.3. Flags after commands
  • 5.4. Comments
  • 5.5. Multiple commands per line
  • 5.6. Reporting large changes
• 6. Command addressing
  • 6.1. Addressing primitives
  • 6.2. Combining addressing primitives
• 7. Command descriptions
• 8. Regular expressions and substitute replacement patterns
  • 8.1. Regular expressions
  • 8.2. Magic and nomagic
  • 8.3. Basic regular expression summary
  • 8.4. Combining regular expression primitives
  • 8.5. Substitute replacement patterns
• 9. Option descriptions
• 10. Acknowledgements
• Footnotes