Obscure Vi bug?

[Danny Zerkel]

In article <1990Aug2.211449.24360 at math-cs.kent.edu> jstuart at kentvax.kent.edu (Jeff Stuart) writes:
>We have a problem here also with vi that when you edit a file and that
>file contains an ei: possibly followed by some text and then another :
>vi gives an error message.  This happened on two machines, 1) Plexus
>P/75 running System V.2, and 2) Zilog Z80 running System V.2.  The error
>message that we get on the zilog is bad register command and on the
>plexus it is something totally different.  Has anyone seen this?
>
This problem shows up in SVR2.  The code in ex (and vi) looks for
'e' or 'v' followed by 'x' or 'i' followed by ':' near the beginning or
end of the file.  It takes the rest of the line as a command line.
We had a user 'pei' in the passwd file near the end.  So everytime
we vi'ed the passwd file, we'd get a stupid message.

Danny J. Zerkel
AT&T Bell Labs
Columbus, OH (No, really! I can't believe it either!!)