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Comment by gnubison | Hacker News Reader

Even better, use a real text editor like ed or ex. (Nowadays ex is more portable because many distros — against POSIX — omit all 55 kilobytes of GNU ed. Of course, smaller systems might not have ex/vi.)

Basic usage looks like this:

    printf '%s\n' '" some commands...' 'wq' | ex -s file

Or:

    ex -s file <<'EOF'
    " some commands...
    wq
    EOF

By the way, these commands are the ones that you use in your vimrc or after a colon in vim — at least, the POSIX subset of that — so any ex commands you learn translate naturally to your normal editor.

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That's an interesting trick, I'll bear it in mind.

That said, the "lottery factor" is often a bigger contributor to the things that land in codebases than "optimality". Plus, I've actually seen somewhere that perl is the most common binary across every system, and it's likely a larger population who know perl than ed would be my guess

Perl more common than vi? The study you’re remembering probably didn’t include POSIX utilities.

With the full understanding that "docker images" are their own special little things:

    $ docker run --rm ubuntu:22.04 bash -c 'command -v ex; command -v ed; command -v vi; command -v perl;' 
    /usr/bin/perl

and the same result for "debian:stable"

---

edit: I just realized that's because apt is _written in_ perl, but tomato, tomahto, and it may very well be that they picked perl for that same universal-binary reason

Huh, interesting.

With Perl, you can't just say "Perl", you have to be specific to which version of Perl.

What do you mean?

How many major versions of Perl do you know about?

What is the distribution of these different versions of Perl across various OSes and OS versions?

Hint: Lots of backward-incompatible changes tend to get made around different major versions. Having Perl 4 is not like having Perl 5 which is not like Perl 6.

I still don't know what your point is.

Are there any contemporary distros that have the "perl" exectuable that is not Perl 5?

If you want to claim broad compatibility, you can't just look at the latest distributions. You have to look at OSes other than Linux. You have to look at older versions of OSes, too. And don't forget the billions of embedded and handheld devices, too.

> You have to look at older versions of OSes, too.

Perl 5 was released in 1994. It is incredibly portable. If you have a system that legitimately has Perl 4, I would love to hear about it, but …

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