Remember edlin?

11 ^AM April 22, 2004

I can’t explain why I typed ‘edlin’ at the Windows-XP command prompt. I haven’t used edlin since 1988, when I had to type up a 100 line Pascal assignment in a PC lab, because all the Unix terminals were full.

Imagine my surprise when it worked.

C:\>edlin
File name must be specified

C:\>edlin /?

Starts Edlin, a line-oriented text editor.

EDLIN [drive:][path]filename [/B]

/B   Ignores end-of-file (CTRL+Z) characters.

C:\>

That’s right. Windows-XP ships with edlin.exe in C:\windows\system32.

By alang | # | Comments (6)

(Posted to Software Development)

Comments

At 12:12, 22 Apr 2004 Bob Ippolito wrote:

Sure, and OS X ships with ed!

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At 16:20, 22 Apr 2004 Alan Green wrote:

Sure, but ed is the standard editor.

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html

Edlin, on the other hand, is ed with all the good bits taken out.

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At 16:59, 22 Apr 2004 Rob Meyer wrote:

Apparently it also still ships with debug. Ah, the days of using debug to manually execute the code in the MFM controller ROM to format the hard drive. That sucked...

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At 14:03, 27 Apr 2004 Ralph Richard Cook wrote:

If you want to feel "modern", run program.

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At 14:04, 27 Apr 2004 Ralph Richard Cook wrote:

Oops, make that "progman".

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At 03:12, 11 May 2004 Gregory Pietsch wrote:

Hey, FreeDOS comes with a free clone of edlin too. The URL is http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/edline/edlin22.zip .
I think it's a little better than the MS edlin, but probably because I wrote it. See for yourself!

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