[10513] in Athena Bugs
RS/6000 vi
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Carr)
Tue May 25 02:57:47 1993
To: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 25 May 1993 02:57:43 EDT
From: John Carr <jfc@Athena.MIT.EDU>
For a good time, run "vi -c" or "view -c" on an RS/6000. I'm not sure
what "-c" is supposed to do, but what it does is this:
vi starts by trying to edit the first environment variable
(if xlogin was used, this is probably "DISPLAY=0:0")
":q" says "-2 more file to edit"
":n" tries to edit the next environment variable (in my case,
"EDITOR=/usr/athena/bin/emacsclient")
":q" now says "-3 more files to edit"
":n", if repeated enough times, causes vi to print "No current
filename" around the time it reaches the end of the environment.
":q" says there is a 2 digit negative number of files left to
edit.
":n", one more time, causes vi to dump core.
vi does not do this on other systems.
On Solaris, "vi -c" returns an error:
vi: option requires an argument -- c
Usage: vi [- | -s] [-l] [-L] [-R] [-r [file]] [-t tag]
[-v] [-V] [-x] [-C] [+cmd | -c cmd] file...
If the correct usage is "vi -c cmd filename" then it makes some sense
(to a sufficiently warped mind) that "vi -c" would act as it does. vi
must be reading NULL as the command and the next string past the
argument list as the filename.
