6 Commands to Edit File With and Without vi, vim on Your Linux

Many times you have to create a file, write the content on your Unix-line or Linux systems. Sometimes you require to write a program and run it. For all this, you need a text editor to read and write in the file.

So let’s see one by one different command for creating and editing the files even if you don’t have vi or vim editor.

File handling using vi and vim editor:

The vi and vim are two widely used command line editors on the Unix-like systems (including Linux). And many of the users know about vi and vim editor.

Following are the simple commands you can use to create the file and edit it.

1. Using vi editor

vi fileName

There are two modes of opening file in vi editors. One is command mode and other is insert mode. As it’s not the part of this discussion. And it’s a big topic to discuss in full fledge. We will describe it in the upcoming article.

2. Using vim editor

vim fileName

What if you don’t have vi or vim editor installed on your system?

How to use commands to edit file if there is no vi, vim on Your Linux?

You can use cat or touch command.

3. Using cat as a text editor

Using cat command to create file

cat  fileName

Write the content and once it is done press ctrl+D.

It will save the contents to the file.

Note: Every time when you run this command, it will erase all the contents and write newly entered content. So, be careful if you have any important data in your file.

4. Using touch command

You can also create the file using touch command.

touch fileName

5. using ssh and scp commands

If you are working on the Linux server, you can see there are limited packages installed on the server. There may be a restriction of using resources and so installed packages.

If none of the commands work, follow the steps give bellow.

• Login into Linux server using ssh command.
• Download the file on the local machine from server.
• Update the file on the local machine.
• Copy the file back to the server. You can use scp command (Secure Copy Paste command) to copy a file from local machine to the server.

6. Using other Programming Language

If you have scripting or any other programming language installed on your system, you can use that to create and edit the file. For example…

• Create and edit a file in C
• File handling using Python

It is pretty easy to edit the file using vi and vim editor. But sometimes you may need to edit the file without vi and vim editor. Hope these commands will help you to edit file if there is no vi, vim.

If you have any doubt or if you have any another alternative to vi and vim to edit the file, feel free to write in a comment below.