> On Mar 12, 2022, at 18:38, i...@tutanota.com wrote: > > In my 30 years of doing sysadmin work, I have never - not even once - come > across a > situation where a normal editor like vi or nano or something equally simple > didn't > exist on the install media.
Lucky you, never ever having to fix something without a “real” editor (and never mind that ‘ed’ *is* a real editor, just not a curses based one). I had to use ed (or maybe it was its predecessor, e) on a Vax 8650 with a DECwriter terminal for a console to fix an fstab issue in 1990(ish). Wouldn’t have done me no good to fire up VI (on the VAX, on the paper console, it would have basically been ‘ex’, anyway — vi being the visual version of ex). Sounds like your problem shouldn’t have prevented you booting single user and then fixing the problem. It also sounds like you’re complaining that the install media should be a full OS with all the things you’re used to (hay, the first thing I installed on on the Suns running 4.1 was emacs — I understand!). What confuses me is the “hours” it took you to fix this. I mean, if you can type in an editor, you can type in the command line (no echo required): cat > /tmp/fstab <type type type> ^D Don’t want to type? grep -v ‘badline’ /mnt/etc/fstab > /tmp/fstab echo “newline” >> /tmp/fstab You broke something on every line? sed ’s/mistake/correction/‘ < /mnt/etc/fstab > /tmp/fstab And if, as you claim, you have 30 years of doing sysadmin work, I can’t imagine in 1992 you had vi on any install media (would love to see an example). Every sysadmin I know (and I have been doing this since 1984) wouldn’t balk at using variations of the above to fix /etc/fstab, _because we have_. Sean PS why put output in /tmp/fstab? You’re not going to overwrite your fstab, are you? ‘mv /mnt/etc/fstab /mnt/etc/fstab.orig; cp /tmp/fstab /mnt/etc/fstab’ once you’ve confirmed /tmp/fstab looks like you want it to. :-)
