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From: stevesu@bronze.UUCP (Steve Summit)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: ed
Message-ID: <772@bronze.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 23-Sep-83 16:16:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: bronze.772
Posted: Fri Sep 23 16:16:33 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 26-Sep-83 09:19:20 EDT
Lines: 27

Has anyone else been bothered by the following limitation of ed? 
There is no easy way to specify the second (or third or
fourth...) instance of a pattern on a line in an s command. 
(There is probably some horrendous way to do it with \( but it
certainly wouldn't be easy.)  For instance, I have the line

	printf("c[i] = %d = 0%o = '%c'\n", c[i], c[i], c[i]);

and I want to change the last c[i] to c[i++].  In this case I
could distinguish it with the trailing ')', but it's not always
that easy.

(Please don't ask me why I'm using ed.  I think most people would
agree that there are some global type edits that are still best
done with a line based editor.  Of course I use a screen editor
most of the time.)

I've actually considered adding this feature myself, but I
haven't figured out a syntax and I'm not anxious to dive into the
regular-expression code.

Has anyone figured out a decent way to do this with vanilla ed?
Has anyone implemented it?  Do the (apparently) ed-compatible ex
and vi have a pattern-match extension to make it easier?

                                  Steve Summit
                                  tektronix!tekmdp!bronze!stevesu