[ILUG] vi going mad

[CP Hennessy]

On Friday 22 December 2006 11:18, Niall O Broin wrote:
> The real answer here, before I even ask the question, is "use emacs"
> but that's not my choice, so on with the question.
>
> A couple of times today a developer's vi session has hung when he
> tried to paste some text into it from the X clipboard (this is on
> dapper). On examination, the vi process is taking 99% of the CPU and
> stracing it, I see that it is repeatedly doing nothing but loads of
>
> select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 0})       = 1 (in [0], left {0, 0})
>
> followed by
>
> brk(0xb4ee000)                          = 0xb4ee000
>
> another armful of
>
> select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 0})       = 1 (in [0], left {0, 0})
>
> followed by another
>
> brk(0xb50f000)                          = 0xb50f000
>
> and so on.
>
> The amount of text pasted was of the order of 5 lines, so why vi
> keeps wanting more memory is a puzzle.
>
> Doing an strace on a working vi, doing the same thing, I see that the
> select returns 1 and there's then a read to get the pasted data, all
> perfectly kosher. So, why in the crashing state does the select keep
> returning 1 but this is not being followed by a read? Any ideas?

Sounds like some "dodgy" data being pasted to me :)

Does the developer get the same problem if she types in the data instead of 
pasting it ?
There is a tool to see what your current selection is, but my xmas memory 
fails me.

CPH