You will also get errors from pacman itself, since e.g. pacman-key or makepkg depend on it. And indeed in turn, pacman-contrib depends on pacman.

awk is directly required by the base metapackage, you cannot do without it.

Should we also add a depends on coreutils, because it needs the "mv" and "rm" programs???

...

Random question: how do you end up with the path: /usr/sbin/paccache

This is not part of the official Arch Linux $PATH, as it is a symlink /usr/sbin -> /usr/bin
You should not have the $PATH repeated twice...

> You will also get errors from pacman itself, since e.g. pacman-key or makepkg depend on it. And indeed in turn, pacman-contrib depends on pacman.
Yeah, doesn't tested pacman-key after gawk removal. Maybe pacman itself needs this dependency. I think this is just not good when you suppose that user is already has a package from another place.

> Should we also add a depends on coreutils, because it needs the "mv" and "rm" programs???
Pacman depends on coreutils actually.

> awk is directly required by the base metapackage, you cannot do without it.
You underestimate my power! © :) I've just stripped Arch down to pure minimal, already get rid of systemd etc.

> Random question: how do you end up with the path: /usr/sbin/paccache
> This is not part of the official Arch Linux $PATH, as it is a symlink /usr/sbin -> /usr/bin
> You should not have the $PATH repeated twice...
Idk, 100% official distro.
# echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/usr/bin/site_perl:/usr/bin/vendor_perl:/usr/bin/core_perl

You removed systemd and you claim it's 100% official? No, that's not a supported configuration.

It's perfectly fine if you want to experiment with or tweak your system, there is a reason we have alternative init systems in the AUR, but when you remove packages like that, it's your responsibility to make sure you have replacements for the base system layer.

And ultimately, awk isn't even reasonable to remove, much like coreutils. It's part of POSIX, and ubiquitously used in shellscripts as one of the low-level glue tools necessary to get more or less anything done.

EDIT:

> Pacman depends on coreutils actually.

... no it doesn't?

$ pacman -Si core/pacman
Depends On : bash glibc libarchive curl gpgme pacman-mirrorlist archlinux-keyring

> And ultimately, awk isn't even reasonable to remove, much like coreutils. It's part of POSIX, and ubiquitously used in shellscripts as one of the low-level glue tools necessary to get more or less anything done.
Yeah you're right. Even alpine has it out of the box.

> It's perfectly fine if you want to experiment with or tweak your system, there is a reason we have alternative init systems in the AUR, but when you remove packages like that, it's your responsibility to make sure you have replacements for the base system layer.
Btw this is for the container, it doesn't need init system at all. Systemd not running even if installed.

Sorry I was really too hasty with "fastest reporting hand in the west" :)

> ... no it doesn't?
# pactree pacman
pacman
├─curl
│ ├─ca-certificates
│ │ └─ca-certificates-mozilla
│ │ └─ca-certificates-utils provides ca-certificates-utils>=20181109-3
│ │ ├─coreutils

I've tested the system with only pacman as explicitly installed package. It has a plenty of dependencies :)