On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Igor Sobrado wrote:
> It seems that VISUAL changes the behaviour of the Korn shell on Solaris,
> it does not only set the visual editor to be used but also the shell
> behaviour.  We can play again with the server of the Geological Sciences
> Department:


From ksh.1 (on Solaris 9/x86):

      EDITOR
            If the value of this variable ends in emacs, gmacs, or
            vi  and  the  VISUAL  variable  is  not  set, then the
            corresponding option  (see  the  set  special  command
            below) will be turned on.

So I'm afraid this is even sort of documented. I'd still say it's a bug 
too, but after people shouted at me when pointing out that pax was doing 
the right thing to chmod 777 files that copied symlinks were ointing to, 
what do I know. :)


  - Hubert