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From: bertrand@eiffel.UUCP (Bertrand Meyer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Vi fails on a Sun-4
Summary: Add environment variables
Keywords: Illegal instruction
Message-ID: <393@eiffel.UUCP>
Date: 16 Aug 90 17:23:50 GMT
References: <392@eiffel.UUCP>
Organization: Interactive Software Engineering, Santa Barbara CA
Lines: 33


In the article referenced above I mentioned a problem
I was having with vi under csh, failing in inexplicable
ways on a Sun-4 running 4.0.

Many thanks to the several people who responded overnight
and allowed me to correct the problem. For the benefit
of others, here is one of the responses by Nick W. Holloway,
I believe from the University of Warwick:

> This is a bug with SunOS 4.0 (even up to 4.0.3).  If the size of your
> environment and the arguments passed to vi are of a magic size, then vi
> will core dump with an illegal instruction.  It is not unique to vi, it
> just happens that it occurs frequently with vi.  If you have access to
> back issues of sunspots, have a look at the message in Volume 7, Issue
> 26, Subject "Obscure SunOS Bug".  This particular bug is fixed in 4.1.
> 
> I imagine the reason that it fails differently in different windows is
> that the environment is different sizes.  To see this, try using the
> command 'printenv | wc -c'.
> 
> The workaround is to just put some junk environment variables in your
> environment to take it over this magic number, or remove some to take
> it under.

The workaround suggested by Mr. Holloway (and several
others in essentially equivalent terms) does work so far
for me.

Thank you very much.
-- 
-- Bertrand Meyer
bertrand@eiffel.com