response 8 of 22:

Sep 22 13:26 UTC 2010

Re resp:6 - I use bash, and example (3) worked without quoting the
asterisk in the command substiution.

Re resp:7 - My introduction to Unix was with Version 6 in 1981 on
a PDP-somthing-or-other.  (My god that was almost 30 years ago!)
The editor choices were 'ed' and a full-screen editor from the Rand
Corporation whose name I don't remember.  The vi editor may have
existed at that point but was not available on Version 6.  The Rand
editor was pretty resource-intensive and anyway didn't support the
dumb terminal I used at home for dialup.  So I had to get pretty
familiar with ed, and even though I've scarcely used it for many
years, the basic commands are still baked into my fingers.  I agree
that it's still useful for batch processing.

Is it true that the standalone grep and sed commands are spinoffs of
facilities built into the original ed?