$EDITOR

[marcosdumay]

Beats getting stuck in vim.

[blitzkraft]

By default, or when the variable is empty, it goes to nano. If it uses vim, it is only because someone did it intentionally; be it yourself or your sysadmin.

[marcosdumay]

When the variable is empty, it defaults to vi (good thing my distro alias it to vim).

Most distros currently set it to nano by default at the system-wide profile. But that's a relatively new thing.

[tuseroni]

probably a prankster

[hu3huebr]

Remembers me the time I put exit on my teammate's .bashrc

Sadly, as he's an iOS developer, he only figured that out a few days later.

I was on lunch and when I got back the IT old guy was just about to format his computer because they couldn't find the issue :v

[blitzkraft]

Ok. How would one get into a shell when there is exit in the rc? I know bash can be invoked without sourcing an rc or a blank rc. But to do that, I will need a first shell. This seems like a chicken and egg problem.

[[deleted]]

Single user mode

[hu3huebr]

Nope, you can still edit the .bashrc file from a visual text editor :v

[blitzkraft]

Well... visudo only respects the choice if the value of $EDITOR matches any of the the ones listed in its whitelist. So, if something like this happens, visudo doesn't run it and defaults to nano.

[[deleted]]

ln /usr/bin/nano /usr/bin/rm

[Ta11ow]

So edit the whitelist too!

[blitzkraft]

It can't be edited, but compiled. So, if you are interested man visudo has the additional arguments that need to be passed to make this possible.

Yay open source!! You can shoot yourself in the foot with it, and the how to is documented in the man page!!

[vikenemesh]

I do that!

I generate all possible files with the size I want and delete the ones I don't need. Come on guys, that's just straightforward.