2011-09-24 A few years ago I could hardly imagine doing what I did today. It wasn't difficult or time consuming doing it now, but back then I just wan't as advanced as I'm today. There was a thread in a forum about mutt and the editor. I responded with some general knowledge. Therefore I ran some tests locally to see if I had recalled everything correctly. I happend to notice, that vi + some-file failed, indicating that `+' needs an argument. Recently however, I had read that this command line would open `some-file' with the cursor positioned on the last line. Vim and nvi, showed the ex- pected behavior, but ex-vi (which is my normal vi) did not. (The SUS, which is always worth a look, didn't say anything about it.) Hence I considered this a bug in ex-vi. I already had the source code locally, thus taking a look. Grep- ping for the error message brought me to the relevant file and place within. The patch is simple: `+' is premitted to have no command associ- ated with it. --- ex.c.orig 2011-09-24 21:04:21.000000000 +0200 +++ ex.c 2011-09-24 21:04:10.000000000 +0200 @@ -392,8 +392,6 @@ while (ac) { if (av[0][0] == '+') { firstpat = &av[0][1]; - if (*firstpat == '\0') - needarg('+'); } else if (av[0][0] == '-') { arggroup: c = av[0][1]; The setting of `firstpat' to the `$' command (which moves to the last line) appeared to be covered in ex_io.c by rop3(): [indent reduced] 671 if (firstpat) { 672 globp = (*firstpat) ? firstpat : "$"; Although I haven't checked his thoroughly in the code, some invo- cation tests showed correct behavior. This should be good enough. Actually, I didn't want to spend hours on this bug report, just be helpful and blame myself with really bad code. The main- tainer, who will know the code base well, which doublecheck it anyway. Then I sent the bug report off by mail, which appeared to be the prefered method for this project. If you haven't provided patches to Free Software projects, this entry should give you an idea of how doing it could be like. At least, I would have been keen on reading such a story, some (not so many) years ago. :-) http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke