The ex utility is the root of a family of editors: ex and vi. ex is a superset of ed(1), with the most notable extension being a display editing facility. Display based editing is the focus of vi.

If you have a CRT terminal, you may wish to use a display based editor; in this case see vi(1), which is a command which focuses on the display-editing portion of ex.

If you have used ed you will find that, in addition to having all of the ed commands available, ex has a number of additional features useful on CRT terminals. Intelligent terminals and high speed terminals are very pleasant to use with vi. Generally, the ex editor uses far more of the capabilities of terminals than ed does, and uses the terminal capability data base (see terminfo(4)) and the type of the terminal you are using from the environment variable TERM to determine how to drive your terminal efficiently. The editor makes use of features such as insert and delete character and line in its visual command (which can be abbreviated vi) and which is the central mode of editing when using the vi command.

The ex utility contains a number of features for easily viewing the text of the file. The z command gives easy access to windows of text. Typing ^D (CTRL-D) causes the editor to scroll a half-window of text and is more useful for quickly stepping through a file than just typing return. Of course, the screen-oriented visual mode gives constant access to editing context.

The ex utility gives you help when you make mistakes. The undo (u) command allows you to reverse any single change which goes astray. ex gives you a lot of feedback, normally printing changed lines, and indicates when more than a few lines are affected by a command so that it is easy to detect when a command has affected more lines than it should have.

The editor also normally prevents overwriting existing files, unless you edited them, so that you do not accidentally overwrite a file other than the one you are editing. If the system (or editor) crashes, or you accidentally hang up the telephone, you can use the editor recover command (or -r file option) to retrieve your work. This will get you back to within a few lines of where you left off.

The ex utility has several features for dealing with more than one file at a time. You can give it a list of files on the command line and use the next (n) command to deal with each in turn. The next command can also be given a list of file names, or a pattern as used by the shell to specify a new set of files to be dealt with. In general, file names in the editor may be formed with full shell metasyntax. The metacharacter `%' is also available in forming file names and is replaced by the name of the current file.

The editor has a group of buffers whose names are the ASCII lower-case letters (a-z). You can place text in these named buffers where it is available to be inserted elsewhere in the file. The contents of these buffers remain available when you begin editing a new file using the edit (e) command.

There is a command & in ex which repeats the last substitute command. In addition, there is a confirmed substitute command. You give a range of substitutions to be done and the editor interactively asks whether each substitution is desired.

It is possible to ignore the case of letters in searches and substitutions. ex also allows regular expressions which match words to be constructed. This is convenient, for example, in searching for the word ``edit'' if your document also contains the word ``editor.''

ex has a set of options which you can set to tailor it to your liking. One option which is very useful is the autoindent option that allows the editor to supply leading white space to align text automatically. You can then use ^D as a backtab and space or tab to move forward to align new code easily.

Miscellaneous useful features include an intelligent join (j) command that supplies white space between joined lines automatically, commands < and > which shift groups of lines, and the ability to filter portions of the buffer through commands such as sort.

The following options are supported:

- | -s

Suppress all interactive user feedback. This is useful when processing editor scripts.

-l

Set up for editing LISP programs.

-L

List the name of all files saved as the result of an editor or system crash.

-R

Readonly mode; the readonly flag is set, preventing accidental overwriting of the file.

-r file

Edit file after an editor or system crash. (Recovers the version of file that was in the buffer when the crash occurred.)

-t tag

Edit the file containing the tag and position the editor at its definition.

-v

Start up in display editing state using vi. You can achieve the same effect by simply typing the vi command itself.

-V

Verbose. When ex commands are read by means of standard input, the input will be echoed to standard error. This may be useful when processing ex commands within shell scripts.

-x

Encryption option. Simulates the X command and prompts the user for a key. This key is used to encrypt and decrypt text using the algorithm of the crypt command. The X command makes an educated guess to determine whether text read in is encrypted or not. The temporary buffer file is encrypted also, using a transformed version of the key typed in for the -x option.

-wn

Set the default window size to n. This is useful when using the editor over a slow speed line.

-C

Encryption option. Same as the -x option, except simulates the C command. The C command is like the X command, except that all text read in is assumed to have been encrypted.

+command | -c command

Begin editing by executing the specified editor command (usually a search or positioning command).

/usr/xpg4/bin/ex

The following operand is supported:

file

A path name of a file to be edited.

ex States

ex Command Names and Abbreviations

/usr/xpg4/bin/ex

ex Command Arguments

ex Commands

ex Command Addresses

Initializing options

Most useful options and their abbreviations

Scanning pattern formation

See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of ex: HOME, PATH, SHELL, TERM, LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.

COLUMNS

Override the system-selected horizontal screen size.

EXINIT

Determine a list of ex commands that are executed on editor start-up, before reading the first file. The list can contain multiple commands by separating them using a vertical-line (|) character.

LINES

Override the system-selected vertical screen size, used as the number of lines in a screenful and the vertical screen size in visual mode.

The following exit values are returned:

0

Successful completion.

>0

An error occurred.

/var/tmp/Exnnnnn

editor temporary

/var/tmp/Rxnnnnn

named buffer temporary

/usr/lib/expreserve

preserve command

/usr/lib/exrecover

recover command

/usr/lib/exstrings

error messages

/usr/share/lib/terminfo/*

describes capabilities of terminals

/var/preserve/login

preservation directory (where login is the user's login)

$HOME/.exrc

editor startup file

./.exrc

editor startup file

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

/usr/bin/ex

/usr/xpg4/bin/ex

ed(1), edit(1), grep(1), sed(1), sort(1), vi(1), curses (3CURSES), term(4), terminfo(4), attributes(5), environ(5), standards(5)

Solaris Advanced User's Guide

The vi and ex utilities are based on software developed by The University of California, Berkeley California, Computer Science Division, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Several options, although they continue to be supported, have been replaced in the documentation by options that follow the Command Syntax Standard (see intro(1)). The - option has been replaced by -s, a -r option that is not followed with an option-argument has been replaced by -L, and +command has been replaced by -c command.

The message file too large to recover with -r option, which is seen when a file is loaded, indicates that the file can be edited and saved successfully, but if the editing session is lost, recovery of the file with the -r option will not be possible.

The z command prints the number of logical rather than physical lines. More than a screen full of output may result if long lines are present.

File input/output errors do not print a name if the command line -s option is used.

The editing environment defaults to certain configuration options. When an editing session is initiated, ex attempts to read the EXINIT environment variable. If it exists, the editor uses the values defined in EXINIT, otherwise the values set in $HOME/.exrc are used. If $HOME/.exrc does not exist, the default values are used.

To use a copy of .exrc located in the current directory other than $HOME, set the exrc option in EXINIT or $HOME/.exrc. Options set in EXINIT can be turned off in a local .exrc only if exrc is set in EXINIT or $HOME/.exrc.

There is no easy way to do a single scan ignoring case.

The editor does not warn if text is placed in named buffers and not used before exiting the editor.

Null characters are discarded in input files and cannot appear in resultant files.

The standard Solaris version of ex will be replaced by the POSIX.2-conforming version (see standards(5)) in the future. Scripts which use the ex family of addressing and features should use the /usr/xpg4/bin version of these utilities.