>Not actually.  You'd be surprised how easy it can be.  A lot of gnu stuff
>does compile 'out of the box' rather well for NetBSD.  I wouldn't suggest
>it as a first thing to try, but....

ooh. good. does that mean you'll give us emacs :-)
?

>
>vipw is used to edit the password files b/c the system, if I am not out
>of date, comes with shadowed passwords built in.  In other words, the
>entries in passwd don't have the encrypted passwd in them, but that's
>stored in /etc/master.passwd or somesuch.  vipw is just a special mode(?)
>for vi which makes the databases for such files update upon finishing the
>edit.

oh, i've been doing this:
vi passwd
vi master.passwd
pwd_mkdb master.passwd

and it works fine.
i'll try vipw since that'll save me two steps extra, but i think it;s good
to know the lower-level stuff.

>
>> so do i :-) thanks. I'll see if vipw helps. OTOH, the disk i've been using
>> vi on behaves 100% perfectly except i moved onto another disk, and despite
>> having an exact copy, it doesn;t work.
>
>That's odd, but may be key to your situation.

see my next post.

_________________________________________________________________________
John Ostrowick
Computer Science Department, University of the Witwatersrand
1 Jan Smuts Ave, Johannesburg, South Africa. 1st Floor, Senate House 1012
Phone: +27 (011) 716-3783
jon@cs.wits.ac.za or jon@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za or jon@is.co.za
My web page is on my server's: http://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/
My ftp site: ftp://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/public partition/
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