Subject: VI is crazy !!!
To: None <netbsd-help@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Joao Carlos Mendes Luis <jonny@gaia.coppe.ufrj.br>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 02/29/1996 21:41:09
Hi folks,

  I don't know what else I could do.  Our VI editor is misbehaving
strangely and I don't know why.  Here are the symptoms:

  If I edit an existing file, add a new line in the middle, and save it,
the saved file will be corrupted.  The *exact* number os characters
added will be added to the file a ^@ (ascii 0) at the end of the file,
but all the remaining text is still unchanged.  There are other symptoms,
but this is the most frequent.  Oh, and this one is even stranger: Once
I did look at the saved file with od -c, and THE MODIFICATIONS WERE THERE.
But when calling vi again, only those damned ^@'s...  When this happen,
if I use :r instead of :e to read the file, it gets read ok.  This does
not happen always, however.  New files present no problem at all.

  I have tried recompiling from source tree, but there were no changes.  It
looks like a temporary file is getting some problems so I checked /tmp,
/var/tmp, /var/tmp/vi.recover and /var/preserve:

30720 1 drwxrwxrwx  3 root  wheel  512 Feb 29 21:19 /tmp
23045 1 drwxrwxrwt  3 root  wheel  512 Feb 29 17:40 /var/tmp
26934 1 drwxrwxrwt  2 root  wheel  512 Feb 29 21:35 /var/tmp/vi.recover
38403 1 drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  512 Oct 19  1994 /var/preserve

  but they seen correct to me.  It's not also a problem of disk quota:

Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd0a      198335    96318    92100    51%    /
/dev/sd0e     1442718  1228406   142176    90%    /usr
/usr/home     1442718  1228406   142176    90%    /home
kernfs              1        1        0   100%    /kern
procfs              4        4        0   100%    /proc

  Does anybody has already had this problem ?  How to solve it ?

  My users (and I) hate to use joe or even elvis, which we are
using as a temporary solution.  (Don't talk me about emacs,
please. 8-) ).

  TIA,

					Jonny

BTW: There are no error messages at all, just file corruption...

--
Joao Carlos Mendes Luis			jonny@coe.ufrj.br
+55 21 290-4698 ( Job )			jonny@cisi.coppe.ufrj.br
Network Manager				UFRJ/COPPE/CISI
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro