Found this surprising having used arch for years. Turns out ed is not in GNU coreutils, which is part of the base package. But there's a posix package which includes ed and other posix stuff.

It is very frustrating. In my personal sh library, I probe for `ed` and, if not available, I alias to `ex -s`; I then write in-place editing scripts carefully to use only common functionality to both. Sigh.

Yeah... to my even bigger surprise, ex also was nowhere to be found!

That is very strange; ex should be part of Arch base... oh well, probe for `vi -s` and if this does not work either, get karma on reddit or whatever by making fun of Arch :D

Now that I look at it, base package is missing [0] a bit of stuff:

> The base package does not include all tools from the live installation, so installing other packages may be necessary for a fully functional base system. In particular, consider installing:

> - userspace utilities for the management of file systems that will be used on the system,

> - utilities for accessing RAID or LVM partitions,

> - specific firmware for other devices not included in linux-firmware (e.g. sof-firmware for sound cards),

> - software necessary for networking (e.g. a network manager or DHCP client),

> - a text editor,

> - packages for accessing documentation in man and info pages: man-db, man-pages and texinfo.

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide#Install_...

one box I tried recently had the absurd and possibly sacrilegious;

   alias vim='emacs -nw'

   alias vi='vim'

   alias ed='vi'

Mein Gott, some people just want to see the world burn

Most Linux distros don't claim to be POSIX compliant. (In fact, software on GNU/Linux in general doesn't claim to be such. Sometimes it's taken as a guideline, more often ignored entirely.)

Which makes GNUs argument for deprecating egrep all the more frustrating.

Debian doesn't seem to install it by default either.