Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!oliveb!pyramid!voder!kontron!optilink!cramer
From: cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: EDLIN Does Have A Use
Message-ID: <1988@optilink.UUCP>
Date: 25 Mar 88 18:31:05 GMT
Organization: Optilink Corporation, Petaluma, CA
Lines: 19

Surprise, surprise, EDLIN is actually useful for something.

I wanted to replace all occurrences of the string "stdmacro.h" with
"stddef.h" in a number of files.  It turns out EDLIN will read commands
from stdin.  So I built a batch file that looked like this:

    for %%i in (*.c *.h) do edlin %%i <temp2

And temp2 contained:

    rstdmacro.h^Zstddef.h
    e

which replaced all the occurrences and exited, saving the file.

Admittedly, not as nice as sed, but everyone has EDLIN.  With some
cleverness, you might be able to do a variety of types of replace with
this approach.

Clayton E. Cramer