[TUHS] basic tools / Universal Unix

[tfb@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw)]

> On 1 Nov 2017, at 03:23, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> A previous boss insisted that all his support staff learn ED, because one day it might be the only editor available on a trashed box (you can't mount /usr etc).

That's happened to me relatively recently (I know ed just well enough to get machines out of that state).

Of course nowadays you can't rely on the thing called 'ed' being 'ed': I know someone who lives in ed but can't run it on some machines because it relies on something in /var somewhere being writable, which it isn't.  I've always thought that the *whole point* of ed was that it did not rely on vast tracts of the system actually being there, still less beng functional.  This person now has to edit things with cat (which, in some future release, will probably start assuming that there's a configured ipv6 interface or something, because why would that ever not be true?).

--tim