partain@cs.utk.edu (David L. Partain) (01/31/91)
We are having occasional annoying behaviour by whatnow that I thought someone might have a fix for. Occasionally, on a Sun (3/60 or Sparc) running sunos4.1 and using mh 6.7 a draft will be deleted after an edit with the following message: whatnow: problems with edit--/zaffer/homes/partain/Mail/draft deleted We found the code for the message, but we can't really find the source of the problem. We suspect that it might in fact be vi returning a wacked out status. Again, this is only occasional, but troublesome. Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone have any idea what it might be. Any help would be appreciated. -- -- David Partain | partain@cs.utk.edu Dept. of Comp. Science | University of Tennessee | work phone: +1 615 974 8990
jromine@buckaroo.ics.uci.edu (John Romine) (01/31/91)
partain@cs.utk.edu (David L. Partain) writes: >...running sunos4.1 ... We suspect that vi [might be] returning a >wacked out status. You're right, it is a problem with "vi". Under Sun OS 4.1, "vi" returns the number of "errors" as its exit status. This confuses MH, as well as programs like "vipw". An error would be something like ":set qwert". I've reported it to Sun: they say they inherited the behavior from the new SYS5 "vi". They're going to consider changing it back as an "enhancement". You might want to report it to your Sun rep as a bug; perhaps doing that would help them decide whether to change it back. Until then, I have a fix in the currently-in-progress patch for MH. I was hoping to include a few more fixes, but I guess I'll bundle up what I have and send it out in a day or so. We also considered replacing "vi" with a script which called "vi" and then did "exit 0" -- this would be a better general solution if Sun won't fix "vi" to call exit(0). -- John Romine
jromine@buckaroo.ics.uci.edu (John Romine) (02/28/91)
partain@cs.utk.edu (David L. Partain) writes: >We are having occasional annoying behaviour by whatnow that I thought >someone might have a fix for... We suspect that it might in fact be >vi returning a wacked out status. You are correct. Complain to your vendor about "vi". There will be a work-around in the next MH patch. -- John Romine
brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) (02/28/91)
In article <27CBEB10.16195@ics.uci.edu> jromine@ics.uci.edu (John Romine) writes: > partain@cs.utk.edu (David L. Partain) writes: > >We are having occasional annoying behaviour by whatnow that I thought > >someone might have a fix for... We suspect that it might in fact be > >vi returning a wacked out status. > You are correct. Complain to your vendor about "vi". There will be a > work-around in the next MH patch. Why not set the editor (prompter-next, or whatever) to a shell script that always exits 0? #!/bin/sh vi ${1+"$@"} exit 0 ---Dan