Ed isn't something which many people use. It's installed here because it can be used by the patch program if you encounter an ed-based patch file. This happens rarely because diff-based patches are preferred these days. Ed uses mktemp to create temporary files in /tmp, but this function has a security vulnerability (see section on Temporary Files in ). This patch makes Ed use mkstemp instead, which is the recommended way to create temporary files. Apply the patch: patch -Np1 -i ../ed-&ed-patch-version;.patch Prepare Ed to be compiled: ./configure --prefix=/usr Continue with compiling the package: make make check And finish off installing the package: make install We need to move the Ed binaries to the /bin directory so they may be used in the event that the /usr partition is unavailable. mv /usr/bin/{ed,red} /bin