Has anybody used the "Edit" shell command in recent years, and/or knows what it does?

[pyrre]

The "Edit" shell command is one of the odder of the odd AmigaDOS shell commands. It's supposed to be a line editor which reads a file and then modifies it according to control commands which one can either enter manually, or have them read from a file. It's basically the AmigaDOS version of the Unix "sed" (stream editor) command.

As a matter of fact, the "Edit" command introduced with Workbench 2.0 never actually worked correctly. It either corrupted the files it read or crashed. Also, the documented features (e.g. in the AmigaDOS manual, 3rd edition) were not all implemented either. Which means that the command was basically useless, and has been for the past 20 or so years.

I'm curious if anybody here has ever used the "Edit" command, or even knows about its existance.

I always used CED for such work....

[pyrre]

Well, the purpose of EDIT is rather to automate edits for scripting, and for that CED is not well suited. EDIT could, in principle, do this. However, it's arcane syntax is not really helpful.  I personally use my edition of SED for this purpose - the syntax is probably not less arcane, though based on the AmigaDos wildcards, but at least the beast works.

i am not in any way a programmer. i never use scripts, and automating scripts.. way over my head.
i preferd CED for editing startup-sequence or user startup, or anything related.