Using the shell: The ed editor is a line editing program available in the shell for editing text files. When you edit a file with ed, the file is copied into the edit buffer, a temporary storage area. You use various subcommands to edit the text in the buffer. When you end your edit session, the contents of the buffer are written to the file system, overwriting the previous contents of the file.

With ed, you work with one line in the buffer at a time. In this discussion, that position in the buffer is called the current working line.

For more details about ed, see z/OS UNIX System Services Command Reference.