Here is a tablulation of the suggestions I got:
emac: 21 (Ref O'Reilly book)
beav: 4
adb: 4
nvi: 2 (new vi, 8 bit aware, and has built in man pages)
bvi: 1 (under construction by bg@efw10.serigate.philips.nl)
bined: 1
sbd: 1
fe: 1 (source provided by mike.phillips@ukpmr.cs.philips.nl)
uzap: 1 (PD, exe provided by martin@gea.hsr.it)
vi -b: 1 (I've never seen this option, and my vi does not support it)
fm: 1
bed: 1 (converts file to octal/hex/ascii-like, invokes your favorite
editor, and re-converts after. nice idea but would lead to huge
file to edit me-thinks. Source provided by
csmoko@relay.nswc.navy.mil)
xdf: 1
To avoid the learning curve I will try nvi first (I already know vi).
Failing that I will try beav which I was told was easy to use.
If there is still no joy I will have to bite the bullet and learn emacs.
Other useful info I was told:
1 - Change 1 byte at a time <-> Do not do a string replacement as this will
change the length of the file and really bugger things up.
2 - Remember to append a null to the end of the new (shorter) pathname.
3 - One could use symbolic links from the old pathname to the new pathname
4 - adb/sdb have ugly user interfaces.
5 - emacs can take 3 hours to build and has a non-insignificant learning curve.
6 - emacs may change the mode of the file so make sure it is executable
after editing.
Thanks everyone,
Don
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:10:15 CDT