Re:Nano 5.0
by cesarb on Thursday July 30, 2020 @08:43AM
(#23997423)
When I started using Linux, nano was often the default, and it had the tendency of corrupting configuration files because of its automatic hard line wrapping unless called as "nano -w". To prevent that kind of accidental corruption, I always remove nano from every system I administer.
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Nano's never done that to me, and I regularly update a single-line authentication cookie in a config file. Do you remember which distro you were using? Sounds like it included a weird /etc/nanorc file.
Debian's has `set nowrap`.
> Do you remember which distro you were using? Sounds like it included a weird /etc/nanorc file.
It was a long time ago, back in the 90s; it probably was either Debian or Slackware or Conectiva.
Edit: it probably was Debian, I found contemporary bug reports complaining of that, for instance https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=127634 and according to https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/n/nan... the default /etc/nanorc was changed to disable wrapping only many years later in 2.0.9-2; even then, you're still depending on nobody commenting that line on /etc/nanorc. Removing the whole package is much safer.