Sams Teach Yourself UNIX® in 24 Hours Second Edition

Editing the UNIX Way

You've learned about how to manipulate your files and even peek inside at your leisure, but now it's time to learn the key UNIX tool for creating and editing files: vi.

Task 10.1: How to Start and Quit vi

You may have noticed that many of the UNIX commands covered so far have one characteristic in common. They all do their work, display their results, and quit. Among the few exceptions are more and pg, in which you work within the specific program environment until you have viewed the entire contents of the file being shown or until you quit. The vi editor is another program in this small category of environments, programs ...