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I can’t recall encountering a system in the last 15 years that didn’t have vim (or at least vi for esoteric things) on it.

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Would not be uncommon in a container or purpose-built VM.

Have you run into that? I can't recall ever facing that issue. Seems very weird to strip down that much and then use a different editor. Do you remember if ed was missing in those machines?

Yes I've run into containers where every utility that wasn't needed to run the service was stripped out. Even tools such as "less."

So what was the editor?

> Do you remember if ed was missing in those machines

I had to laugh out loud. I couldn't imagine such a system, that wouldn't be POSIX compliant. So I looked it up, and indeed, it's entirely possible. Debian doesn't necessarily include it.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/609067

While not mandatory, vi is part of the POSIX commands. I mean you could use ed or even hack your way with awk, sed, and/or grep but no one wants to deal with that bullshit. And if you're installing vi you might as well install vim, right?

I've been on a lot of systems and can't remember a single instance of not having vi (though I do vim). So pretty rare, like you said

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_POSIX_commands

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