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Comment by alyandon | Hacker News Reader

   - Containers still do have an whole POSIX-ly userland with shell and coreutils. 
     You can extract every container onto an disk and make an static linux kernel boot it.

What's in a docker image is entirely up to the image creator. Docker containers don't necessarily have to use a complete userland + init system as a base.

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In practice, containers do have a shell, since a few things (Dockerfile RUN & CMD in non-exec mode, environment variable substitution, docker exec shell) dont work without it.

But you don't have to have all that, you can have just a single executable in the container, like here for example: https://github.com/containous/traefik-library-image/blob/f24...

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