Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!spool.mu.edu!sdd.hp.com!usc!jarthur!ucivax!jromine
From: jromine@buckaroo.ics.uci.edu (John Romine)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: Re: odd whatnow behaviour
Message-ID: <27A74978.26797@ics.uci.edu>
Date: 30 Jan 91 22:32:24 GMT
References: <1991Jan30.203833.16446@cs.utk.edu>
Reply-To: jromine@ics.uci.edu (John Romine)
Organization: UC Irvine Department of ICS
Lines: 23
Nntp-Posting-Host: buckaroo.ics.uci.edu

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