More interestingly, it would be nice to see their reverse dependencies: $ apt-cache rdepends --installed sed sed Reverse Depends: xml-core

More interestingly, it would be nice to see their reverse dependencies: $ apt-cache rdepends --installed sed sed Reverse Depends: xml-core fuse3 Anyway, sh, awk and sed are there because it is mandatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_POSIX_commands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_POSIX_commands Perl and Python seems to support a lot of OS userland. If you have GNOME, you probably have the gjs command too. It's a JavaScript interpreter.