mek@rruxu.UUCP (M Kaufman) (08/08/85)
<yum> Has anyone out there encountered problems with VI and certain terminals that cause VI to dump core? I use an HP 2392A, and on occasion (this is one of those nasty intermittent bugs) when I invoke VI, as soon as I'm in and type any character, I get the "memory fault - core dumped" message we all know and love and VI quits. I don't know what causes it - most of the time VI works fine (in fact, this letter was edited using VI) but occasionally dumps core for no good reason. Oh yes, $TERM is exported and set to "hp" . I am running VI under sys 5 release 2 - I don't recall if the problem arose under release 1, but I doubt if there were any VI changes from release 1 to release 2 that caused it. It could very well be a hardware bug in my terminal - I guess flakey terminals could blow VI away. Any hints? Matt Kaufman Bell Communications Research All opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone, so there!
alan@drivax.UUCP (Alan Fargusson) (08/15/85)
> Has anyone out there encountered problems with VI and certain terminals > that cause VI to dump core? I use an HP 2392A, and on occasion (this > is one of those nasty intermittent bugs) when I invoke VI, as soon as I'm > in and type any character, I get the "memory fault - core dumped" > message we all know and love and VI quits. Yes, I have seen VI dump core. We had lots of problems dumping core on the 286 when we were porting it. There is a lot of questionable code in VI in the area of memory allocation, and there a several places where it dereferences NULL (contents are zero) pointers. This works most of the time on a VAX, but never on a 286. I didn't port it, and I don't know exactly where to look to fix it. -- Alan Fargusson. { ihnp4, amdahl, mot }!drivax!alan
tanner@ki4pv.UUCP (Tanner Andrews) (08/19/85)
Depending on the version of "vi" being used on the `286, core will be dumped if "showmatch" is set and parentheses &c. are encountered on input. May happen even if not in "visual" mode. Once you get up to vers 3.7 you are reasonably safe from core dumps (tho "recover" doesn't work here, and filesize is limited to 45K). -- <std dsclm, copies upon request> Tanner Andrews, KI4PV uucp: ...!decvax!ucf-cs!ki4pv!tanner