Editing Files on the Command Line

Abstract

Believe it or not, one of the things you’ll end up spending most of your time doing on Linux is editing text files. They get absolutely everywhere, and you’ll find them used for content, source code for applications, configuration files, and startup scripts. The reason is that despite their somewhat basic and boring nature, they are very useful for storing human readable information. When you combine this with ease of use, you know you’re on to a winner. Linux doesn’t have a registry like Windows, and it’s extremely rare for applications not to use text files for their configuration. Even Sendmail, which has a historically evil config file (so evil in fact you need to write a config file for yet another application that will then create the Sendmail config file for you), stores its config file as plain old text.