Re: ed scripts in Windows command shell

On Fri, 16 May 2008 07:27:53 +1000, <[email protected]> wrote:

> On May 14, 4:24 pm, [email protected] wrote:
>> Although I have experience with diff and ed on *nix, I just can't seem
>> to get ed to work in the Win32 environment (cmd.exe).
>>
>> diff -e oldfile newfile > script.ed
>>
>> gives the proper ed commands, but any variation of
>>
>> type script.ed | ed oldfile > result
>>
>> just won't work: I get either an empty result, or the last line of the
>> original file repeated a few times in the result. I've tried 'for'
>> loops with 'echo' and 'type', appending 'w' and 'q' commands to
>> script.ed, and all sorts of variations. Still no luck.
>>
>> Has anyone had success using 'ed' commands with Win32?
>>
>> P.S. I want to use the 'ed' output from diff, since several 'ed'
>> commands can be concatenated together to apply several changes -
>> unlike 'context' and 'unified' diffs that have to be appiled
>> individually against each intermediate result.
>
> P.P.S.
>
> I'm trying to use the GnuWin32 ed utility.
>

This worked:

ed < script.ed oldfile

Note that script.ed has "w" at the end to tell ed to write the changes.

If you have multiple ed script files generated by diff, then concatenate  
all the script files and append "w" into one script file.  In cmd.exe:

(cat f1 f1 ... && echo w) > script.ed

Don't know GnuWin32's ed doesn't accept input from a pipe.

-- 
Kam-Hung Soh <a href="http://kamhungsoh.com/blog">Software Salariman</a>