Re: Differences in RH Fedora coming from Debian
> Actually, there is also a reason to teach 'vi' in classes like that. We
> all have our own personal preferences when it comes to editors, but the
> reality still is that quite often when a system is half broken in single
> user mode and one needs to edit this or that file to bring it back to life
> 'vi' is the only editor available. Believe me, I've been doing technical
> support for quite a while and had to walk a few sysadmins through the
> painful process of editing in file using 'vi' when they had absolutely no
> knowledge of the tool.
That really doesn't make sense. I mean if you use emacs, nano, etc, they
should all also be available in single user mode. On my Debian box, vi is
nvi (or sometimes vim) and it lives in /usr/bin. If something is screwy
with my system and I can't run nano or emacs, I won't be able to run vi
either. I would then be stuck with ed for editing.
In fact I believe that ed, nano, and nvi are all standard packages in Debian.
If I was going to put a staticly linked editor in /bin/ for emergencies
there's no real reason to choose vi over nano (except that I hate nano and
prefer vi myself). In any case the system may be in such a hosed state
that no curses-like application will run, in that case you'd be stuck with
an editor like ed anyways :)
Bijan
--
Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com>
http://www.crasseux.com
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