open and edit file at command prompt

Hi there

I would like to be able to open a file and display at the command prompt, and then be able to edit the screen data, and save it back out to the file. Is this possible?
The reason I am doing it at the command prompt is because this is a uni assignment. Of course I have no problem in opening a text file to the screen and saving data on the screen out to a file, my problem is editing data loaded from a file on the screen.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Well you couldn't write a program to manipulate the data in window's standard command prompt. What you could do is, display the information in the file, then have commands that you can pipe the text through to edit the file.

...but then unix already has that command.

heh SlyMaelstrom

what is the unix command. The program will be compiled in unix, I am only writing it on a windows machine.

thanks

There are lots of Unix commands to manipulate text in a file. Just look up Unix commands. One example is awk.

Code:

---

$ cat hello.txt
Hello, Sally!
Hello, Jimmy!
Hello, Betty!
Hello, Michael!
$ cat hello.txt | awk -F, '{print $1}'
Hello
Hello
Hello
Hello                 
$ cat basket.txt | awk -F, '{print "Goodbye, " $2}'
Goodbye, Sally!
Goodbye, Jimmy!
Goodbye, Betty!
Goodbye, Michael!

---

Note, I wrote this by hand, it wasn't actually passed in Unix Command Line. So if there is a syntax error, sorry.