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There's something mildly charming about fixes to ed(1) in software released today.

> Fixed ed(1) to print bytes read/written and the ? prompt to stdout, not stderr.

In the old days, Unix rescue boot floppy disk to fix workstations or servers only included minimal text editors such as ed (i think vi was added later). So if you were a Unix admin or power user, you need to know ed to fix the dam system. The 'ed' text editor was available everywhere. These days rescue disks boot from USB or CD/DVD-ROM and may have a full desktops or operating systems running. A little bit of history, I guess. BTW, I prefer https://www.system-rescue.org/ these days to fix Linux bare metals.

Perhaps more important, as a line editor, 'ed' would often work when your terminal was otherwise too borked up for vi or pico to work.

Though in most cases, you can just type “reset” to reset your terminal to a sane state. If the problem is not the terminal’s state, but how software is trying to talk to it, setting TERM=vt100 (with a “reset” for good measure afterwards) usually works for most if not all terminals nowadays.

I used 'stty sane' or mucked with 'tset' directly. To many possibilities of 'reset' being aliased to something I might not want.

setting TERM=vt100 (with a “reset” for good measure afterwards) usually works for most if not all terminals nowadays

Kids these days and their 'everything is a vt100'. Perhaps true nowadays, but certainly not always (looks at his HP700/96).

You just reminded me a slightly related strip: http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/elemental/605973

Last time I checked, OpenBSD installer didn't have any editors but ed.

It comes with vi (nvi, maybe?) and mg, a small Emacs-like editor.

He means the ramdisk image, not the installed system, which obviously has ed, vi and mg. And xedit.

ed is still the standard editor.

And there's even a book about it, in case anyone has trouble figuring out how to use ed: https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/product/ed/

Love the books by mwl. Have physical copies of several of them, and the whole bunch of the ebook versions. Currently reading one of the physical copies. The one about Ed I have in ebook format only and didn’t read it yet. Will get to that one after I finish reading the physical books that I have from him.

what do you mean by standard editor

The POSIX standard defines ed as one of the editors that must be present for a system to be standard complaint, the other being vi I believe. You can always expect ed to be available to you on a Unix system.

ed: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition...

vi: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition...

You can see all of the utilities this way. The ex editor is also standard.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/

TIL: busybox has ed and vi but not ex. https://www.busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html (so ex might be nice to learn but it might be not available on common systems like OpenWRT)

Technically, vi and ex are part of the User Portability Utilities extension.

This was initially why I learned enough of the vi keybinds to get by.

You can expect it to be there.

You can expect that on a unix system that has applied, paid and received the unix certification.

Most linux distros (and most BSDs afaik) are not unix certified.

MacOS is, for that matter.

POSIX != Unix (the certification)

It is true that all certified Unix systems follows POSIX, but it doesn't mean that non-certified systems are forbidden to follow POSIX. Most Linux distributions have ways to turn to 98% compliant, and BSDs have always strive to follow POSIX.

Weird fact: POSIX was actually named by RMS.

OpenBSD was fairly anti-POSIX in the past. I don't know if that's relaxed at all, but they very much do not chase after it.

But they do have ed, vi (plus ex), and mg (which is not standard but nice to have) in their base system.

Two of those programs predate POSIX and do not indicate that OpenBSD follows POSIX.

They are making their operating system to the design they like best. Some of it happens to coincide with what POSIX asks for, but it is merely coincidental.

I vaguely recall some interview with or blog post / talk by an OpenBSD developer, where they said that POSIX tended towards adopting whatever GNU/Linux did, and that the BSD crowd's interests were not taken into consideration that much.

I don't know much about the process behind POSIX/SUS, but I can understand how OpenBSD developers wouldn't be super enthusiastic about POSIX compliance if they felt their input was falling on deaf ears.

FWIW, I did use the SUS as my main reference when writing a few hobby projects, and OpenBSD gave me no problems whatsoever. macOS, on the other hand, which is a certified Unix, did not support barriers at the time (that was ~10 years ago, I have no idea if Apple added support since). (I know barriers are optional, but come on.)

Inspur K-UX is a Linux distribution that is officially a Unix.

OpenEuler, Huawei's version of RHEL, is also UNIX-certified.

I wonder what benefit the certification has these days. IIUC, it used to be a requirement for contracts from large corporations and government agencies, but these days the number of commercial Unix systems is fairly small, and RHEL is so common in those environments, I wonder if it there's still places where it's required.

They still have ed though, do they not?

Even DOS and VMS had ed, I'm sure other OSs too.

Probably a reference to https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

Here: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

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