[arch-general] "vi" just terminates on a 32bit machine

[Martti Kühne]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 5:16 AM, Anatol Pomozov
<anatol.pomozov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 2:21 AM, Manuel Reimer
> <Manuel.Spam at nurfuerspam.de> wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> if I access one of my systems via "ssh" and try to use "vi" there, then it immediately returns with exit status "1".
>>
>> System is an up-to-date 32bit ArchLinux system.
>>
>> I've attached the strace output of my try to run "vi" to this mail.
>>
>> Can someone see there what could have happened? Reinstalling "vi" didn't fix this for me...
>>
>> Thank you very much in advance
>
> strace has following lines near the end
>
> write(1, "\33[?1049h\33[39;1H\"/var/tmp\" ", 26) = 26
> write(1, "\33[7mValue too large for defined "..., 41) = 41
> write(1, "\33[27m\n", 6)                = 6
>
> It cut the second part of the message "Value too large for
> defined...". Just run vi without strace and check vi output/logs, most
> likely the error will be self-descriptive.

Most likely it says "Value too large for defined data type" and
probably relates to the ansi escape 1049 above which directs the
terminal to switch to an alternate buffer.
Now as a shot in the dark - I'm really just taking a bold guess here,
because I had terminal problems in ssh without -t before - the shell
within ssh can't figure out the terminal's size and gets a dummy value
like -1, which is far too much memory to allocate in any context.

I'm really interested if passing -t to ssh will fix the issue.

cheers!
mar77i