Re: editor alternatives?

[Richard Kettlewell <rjk@terraraq.org.uk>]

Jules Bean <jules@jellybean.co.uk> writes:

> However: we are discussing the 'editor' alternative here.  The
> 'editor' alternative is used by certain system commands to invoke a
> 'sensible' editor for certain system configuration files.
> (E.g. vipw uses it to editor passwd, I think).

It's not just configuration files, policy says that any program that
needs to launch an editor should fall back to 'editor' if EDITOR is
not set.

(And anyway it seems perfectly plausible that multibyte characters
would be legitimate in some hypothetical configuration file, too.
Hmm.  What encoding should the "gecos" field in /etc/passwd use?)

-- 
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