Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!apple!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!hp4nl!eutrc3!tuewsd!wsinkees From: wsinkees@lso.win.tue.nl (Kees Huizing) Newsgroups: comp.editors Subject: Re: vi abbreviation for :w :n ? Message-ID: <455@tuewsd.lso.win.tue.nl> Date: 9 Oct 89 14:26:36 GMT References: <4728@tekcrl.LABS.TEK.COM> <26465@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <5486@alvin.mcnc.org> Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands Lines: 33 ge@mcnc.org (George Entenman) writes: >In article bitbug@lonewolf.sun.com (James Buster) writes: > ... >But one day a couple of weeks ago, she started up vi on a C file and >then used control-Z to stop it. She then started her typical work loop >and worked for about 3 hours, making extensive changes on the original C >file. >After finishing, she noticed a vi job sitting in background and typed >'fg'. Seeing that the file was a very old version, she typed ':q' to >get out. >3 hours of work were gone! There was lots of screaming that I won't >describe here. It turned out that her .login file, which >she had borrowed from someone, set EXINIT to autowrite. How is this possible? If you type ':q' nothing is written by our vi! I quit with '^Z' many times and sometimes I accidentally start up a new vi-job on the same file. When I see the old jobs hanging around, I reactivate them and silently quit with ':q' without any harm. Even if you have autowrite on, vi warns you when you quit this way and some changes have not been written yet. So, what is going on here? If there is something harmful in autowrite, I would really like to know, since I use it very heavily, quitting with '^Z' and executing latex etc. from within vi with ':!compile' . Can someone explain me the danger of my ways? Kees Huizing -- Kees Huizing - Eindhoven Univ of Techn - Dept Math & Comp Sc - The Netherlands DOMAIN: wsinkees@win.tue.nl BITNET: wsdckeesh@heitue5 FAX: +31-40-436685