SCO Unix ® section

I'm not following SCO any longer

Today someone asked me about a change in the behavior of SCO's "vi":

On 5.6 if :X was entered you got "encryption facility not available". On OS6 it encrypts without an a obvious way out or seeing what you've entered. After 20+ years with vi the keystrokes become automatic , part from occasionally getting the case of ":x" wrong an losing the whole file. Apart from being more careful, is there anyway of disabling the encrypt feature?

I'm not aware of any. I suggested using ":map! X w", but that has the downside of being unable to enter "X" when you want to. If you've just done this accidentally, you should be able to disable it with ":set key=" but that's also a little annoying.

But that's not the point of this post. The final question was "What changed between the os releases?". I could guess: they started using vim instead of traditional vi, maybe. But I don't know, and I suddenly realized this also: I don't care.

That was an epiphany of sorts. I haven't been paying much attention to SCO for a while, have stopped reading the comp.unix.sco.misc newsgroup daily as I used to, and have fewer and fewer SCO customers, but I hadn't consciously moved away from being interested. It just slowly happened. But when asked that question, I realized that the answer was simply this: I have no idea. I expect SCO to be out of business very soon so I stopped following them after 5.0.7.

Ayup, it's official now, and you heard it here: I'm not paying much attention to SCO. I know next to nothing about their OSR6 release and don't plan on learning anything about it. I'm not dropping current SCO customers, of course, and if one of them can't be dissuaded from upgrading to OSR6, I suppose I'll be available to help. But I'm more likely to suggest that they look around and find someone who has retained their interest in things SCOish - assuming I couldn't convince them of their utter folly in even considering such an upgrade, of course.

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Fri Aug 18 16:01:00 2006:   rbailin


I know you don't really care one way or the other, but I feel compelled to provide an answer to the original problem:

All the user has to do after unintentionally hitting :X is to hit the Delete (interrupt) key at the prompt to "Enter Key:". That prompt doesn't go away unless you enter another ":".

And of course, this is all not documented on the vi man page in OSR6 (not that you care about this, either!).

--Bob



Fri Aug 18 16:07:08 2006:   rbailin


I just noticed after all these years that the posting time stamps seem to be on GMT, not on EDT of your home state of Mass. (It's only 12PM here, and the post is stamped 16:xx.) Whyizzit?

--Bob



Fri Aug 18 16:30:25 2006:   TonyLawrence


The server isn't in MA..

I've always kept it at GMT.



Fri Aug 18 19:16:10 2006:   TonyLawrence


Well, I DO care about the problem, and hitting the interrupt is of course the best answer - I should have thought of that.





Tue Sep 5 20:46:41 2006:   Gantry


Couldn't have said it any better Tony, I haven't give SCO 6 the slightest of thought and I could care less. SCO won't be around for too long and if a customer needs an upgrade, I would oblige but at this point I would recommend 5.0.7 first becaues of the wealth of knowledge out there about it. Every year we lose more and more SCO customers to Linux (just like how we used to lose Altos systems to SCO) and all for the better I say...



Tue Oct 10 14:52:53 2006:   TonyLawrence



Paul Maines reported:

I have an answer to this if anyone is interested
Change /opt/SCO/Unix/6.0.0.Ni/usr/bin/crypt to something else and vi will
behave like it did in OS5


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