Forwarded by request... Cliff ----- Forwarded message from David Jardine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 21:49:08 +0200 To: Cliff Sarginson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: segfault in vi From: David Jardine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> A night's sleep and a day's work out of sight of any computer gave me time to realise that I had no business giving vi this file to deal with in the first place - it was a ninety-line text formatted by a Microsoft word-processing program and thus containing all sorts of raw numbers (the 'file' command told me it was a 'data' file). FWIW, I did find out that the segfault didn't occur while I was trying to edit the file, ie removing the formatting stuff. At this stage the console just froze; I killed the process from another console (I was running vi under strace, as Karsten suggested, and it didn't seem to matter which process I killed), and returned to the original console to find it doing strange things like not echoing commands to the screen, not putting the prompt on a new line, and using a linefeed without a carriage return for new lines in its output. The segmentation fault occurred after I rebooted and accepted vi's generous offer to recover the file with -r. The strace file associated with that was 26000 lines long and I found nearly 2000 files in /tmp produced by vi at one stage. Cliff's point about long lines must be valid - some of them seemed to be thousands of characters long. So, does this count as a bug? I don't think I should have tried this with vi - dman's suggestion that I try antiword, which I ungraciously ignored, seems to make sense, although I don't know whether I'm going to want to do this again - but shouldn't vi have realised that it was taking on something it wasn't equipped to do? I don't know anything about bug reporting, by the way, but I'm sure some kind soul will give me a starting hint :) Sorry to have taken up your time. David On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 07:41:20AM +0200, Cliff Sarginson wrote: > Well, you have found a bug I would guess. That is "why"... > Maybe a buffer over-run..too long a line ? > Report it.. > Cliff > > On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 02:01:58AM +0200, David Jardine wrote: > > I only know that I type 'vi' on the command line and - I've > > just checked - 'which vi' tells me '/usr/bin/vi' but, hang on, > > 'ls -l /usr/bin/vi' tells me it's a symlink to > > /etc/alternatives/vi and, hang on another sec, that is a symlink > > to /usr/bin/nvi, which seems to be the final destination at > > 315248 bytes. So let me rephrase my question. Does anyone > > know why nvi baulks at removing formatting mumbo-jumbo from > > WordPad files? > > > > David > > > > > > On Sun, Aug 26, 2001 at 07:30:57PM -0400, dman wrote: > > > On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 01:40:50AM +0200, David Jardine wrote: > > > | I was trying to remove the formatting mumbo-jumbo of a MS WordPad > > > | document in vi, but it segfaulted - repeatedly. Is there a > > > | known reason for this? > > > > > > Uhh, vi is and copyrighted by AT&T and I don't think it is maintained > > > anymore. You don't have it. Now which vi *clone* do you have > > > installed? nvi? elvis? vim? I like vim the best -- it has a lot of > > > really useful features and is very stable, not to mention extremely > > > cross-platform. Try 'antiword' though -- it is really cool at > > > rendering Word docs as plain text. > > > > > > HTH, > > > -D > > > > > > > > > -- > > > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > > > > -- > > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > ----- End forwarded message -----
