Re: ed: p and pppppp same

[Paul Eggert]

Dan Jacobson <address@hidden> writes:

> In ed(1),
> pppppppppppp
> and
> p
> do the same thing, print one line.

In traditional ed, "p" and "pp" both print one line,
and "ppp", "pppp", etc. are errors.

POSIX requires support for both "p" and "pp", and
deliberately doesn't specify whether "pp" writes
the line once or twice.

So, the GNU behavior is a compatible extension to traditional
behavior, and conforms to POSIX here.

I'm not sure whether all this mess is worth documenting.  ed hasn't
changed for 10 years, and I'm not sure who's maintaining it now, if
anybody.