ied(1)

Debug mode. Print information about the operation of the program. It is best used to determine if a program puts ied into transparent mode unexpectedly.

Keep the history in a file named filename. If a file of that name already exists and is a history file, the latter part of it (the last size lines as specified by the -s option) is used as the initial value of the history. If the -h option is not used, the environment variable IEDHISTFILE is used to supply the name. If neither is present, an unnamed temporary file is used, and no initial value is provided.

Force interactive mode. Normally ied simply execs the command to which it is asked to be a front end when the standard input is not a tty (this allows aliases to be used for commands used in shells without interfering with their operation). This option forces ied to remain as a front end, and all editing functions are in place. This permits a utility that behaves differently in interactive and batch modes to be driven from a pipe or file in interactive mode. This is particularly useful in testing commands that make this distinction.

charmap is a file of 256 or fewer lines. The line number in the file is the ordinal of a character as seen as input by ied, and the character on the line is the character generated as output (and also used as editing characters). This allows remapping of (ordinary) keys such as for a Dvorak keyboard. Characters must start in column one of each line, and be represented as 1-4 characters followed by a space or the newline character for the next line. Characters after the space are ignored as comments. Single-character entries represent themselves. Two-character entries where the first character is a circumflex (^) converts the second character to the corresponding control character. Two-character sequences where the first character is backslash (\) use the C language conventions:

Three- and four-character sequences must be \nn or \nnn, giving the octal value for the character. If charmap is less than 256 lines long, the remaining characters are mapped to themselves.

Many commands do not prompt when ready for input. ied approximates a prompting mechanism for such commands. This is not always perfectly successful, but for many commands it helps. In the worst case, the prompt is interspersed with output in the wrong location. prompt is a string as used in the format argument to printf() (see printf(3S)). The only % conversions that can be included are up to one instance of %d which is converted to the sequential number of the command, and any number of occurrences of %% which is treated as a literal % character. Prompting is suppressed when ied is operating in transparent mode.

This sets "non-raw" mode. Normally ied uses its own editing capabilities when reading simple text. This causes ied to use tty line discipline most of the time. The disadvantage of the default mode is that more context switches and general processing are required. The advantage is that ied is more transparent. For example, to specifically send an end-of-file in the non-raw mode requires that the end-of-file character (usually Ctrl-D) be followed by a carriage return. Similarly the "literal next" function (Ctrl-V) cannot escape the line-erase and line-kill functions in non-raw mode.

This option specifies the size of the history buffer. When ied is started with an existing history file, approximately the last size lines are available to the history mechanism (the number is not guaranteed to be exactly size). Other lines in the file are retained until such time as ied is started on that history file and it exceeds approximately 4K bytes in size, at which time ied discards older entries at the beginning of the file until it is near 4 KB in size. Since this occurs only at startup, history files can grow to be quite large between restarts. Larger values of size make the process image larger.

If -s is not specified, the value of the environment variable IEDHISTSIZE is used. If neither is specified, a default is used.

Set transparent mode. This forces ied to permanently be in transparent mode (as discussed above). It is primarily useful with -i for some classes of automated processing. In particular, it is useful for driving a command if the command takes as input what ied would interpret as editing characters. Thus with the appropriate combinations of -i and -t, it is possible to drive an editor such as vi or a screen-smart application from a batch file.

Join lines. Considering the most recently edited line (which is empty immediately after a line is sent to the application) to be the "last line" of the history, the current line being displayed from the history is appended to the end of the last line, and the position in the history is reset to be at the last line which is then displayed. A space is inserted between the old and new text on the last line. The cursor is left on that space. Because ied's understanding of line continuation is minimal, this is useful for editing long statements.

Not supported.

Not supported.

Sends nothing to the application, but inserts the line in the history (useful for adding comments to history file).

(File name expansion). Not supported.

Macro expansion. Not supported.

Note however that ksh has a rarely-used function _ that substitutes words from the previous line (this is not the macro $_, but rather an editor command). If a preceding count is given, it uses the countth word of the last line. This is much more useful with ied.

(file name expansion) Not supported.

Note that the command M-. (and its synonym M-_) provide the same functionality as the vi mode _ command.

Not supported.

Although supported, it may not always appear correctly on the screen. The ^L command can be used to redraw the line. See below for the discussion on prompting.