GNU ed 1.20 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

I am pleased to announce the release of GNU ed 1.20.

GNU ed is a line-oriented text editor. It is used to create, display, modify 
and otherwise manipulate text files, both interactively and via shell 
scripts. A restricted version of ed, red, can only edit files in the current 
directory and cannot execute shell commands. Ed is the 'standard' text 
editor in the sense that it is the original editor for Unix, and thus widely 
available. For most purposes, however, it is superseded by full-screen 
editors such as GNU Emacs or GNU Moe.

The homepage is at http://www.gnu.org/software/ed/ed.html

The sources can be downloaded from http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ed/ 
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/ed/ or from your favorite GNU mirror.

The sha256sum is:
c6030defe6ae172f1687906d7354054c75a6a9130af319d4e73c50a91959c5a6  ed-1.20.tar.lz

This release is also GPG signed. You can download the signature by appending 
'.sig' to the URL. If the 'gpg --verify' command fails because you don't 
have the required public key, then run this command to import it:

  gpg --recv-keys 8FE99503132D7742

Key fingerprint = 1D41 C14B 272A 2219 A739  FA4F 8FE9 9503 132D 7742


Changes in version 1.20:

  * New command-line options '+line', '+/RE', and '+?RE' have been 
implemented to set the current line to the line number specified or to the 
first or last line matching the regular expression 'RE'.
(Suggested by Matthew Polk and John Cowan).

  * File names containing control characters 1 to 31 are now rejected 
unless they are allowed with the command-line option '--unsafe-names'.

  * File names containing control characters 1 to 31 are now printed using 
octal escape sequences.

  * Ed now rejects file names ending with a slash.

  * Intervening commands that don't set the modified flag no longer make a 
second 'e' or 'q' command fail with a 'buffer modified' warning.

  * Tilde expansion is now performed on file names supplied to commands; if 
a file name starts with '~/', the tilde (~) is expanded to the contents of 
the variable HOME. (Suggested by John Cowan).

  * Ed now warns the first time that a command modifies a buffer loaded 
from a read-only file. (Suggested by Dan Jacobson).

  * Ed now creates missing parent directories when writing to a file.

  * It has been documented that 'e' creates an empty buffer if file does 
not exist.

  * It has been documented that 'f' sets the default filename, whether or 
not its argument names an existing file.

  * The description of the exit status has been improved in '--help' and in 
the manual.

  * The variable MAKEINFO has been added to configure and Makefile.in.

  * It has been documented in INSTALL that when choosing a C standard, the 
POSIX features need to be enabled explicitly:
  ./configure CFLAGS+='--std=c99 -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=2'


Please send bug reports and suggestions to bug-ed@gnu.org


Regards,
Antonio Diaz, GNU ed maintainer.

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