Programming Praxis

[ I’ve been very busy at work this week, and don’t have time to write a proper exercise. My apologies. ]

I stumbled across Twitter account ed1conf that included this method of collaborating with another user on an ed(1) session:

Have two ed(1) sessions open concurrently and want to easily transfer lines between them?

    $ ed -p"a)" a.txt

in another shell

    $ mkfifo fifo
    $ ed -p"b)" b.txt

then

    a) 15,21 w fifo

then

    b) 13r fifo

Can reuse the same fifo bidirectionally. Finally

    !rm fifo

I’m not sure if that’s brilliant or insane! Actually, I’m not even sure if a whole Twitter account devoted to ed(1) is brilliant or insane.

Perhaps you would like to share with us some other examples of brilliant insanity.