December 2005
Intermediate to advanced
400 pages
11h 33m
English
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Editing Text Files
While editing text files in the GUI is straightforward using the built-in TextEdit
program (/Applications), editing files using the command-line tools hasn’t always been a walk in the park, unless you are comfortable with old-school text editors
like vi or Emacs. But thanks to the open command, several of the command-line editing tasks that you need to perform can be done in the GUI. For example, to open your bash history file in TextEdit, use the following command:
$ open ~/.bash_historyFor most text-file editing, however, TextEdit is a little underpowered. Also, it can’t be used as the command-line editor program (via the EDITOR environment variable), and it can’t be used to edit files while you are logged in remotely.