[CentOS] Very strange problem i have faced in my 2 years carrier

Stephen Harris lists at spuddy.org
Wed Sep 12 10:37:43 UTC 2007


On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 09:24:57AM +0100, Andy Green wrote:
> Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> 
> > the spelling of root was changed from "root" to "R00t". i changed to
> 
> I have seen vi do this action when it didn't understand a keycode on teh
> terminal you are using properly... change the case of a few letters next
> to the cursor.  But IIRC that was busybox vi.

What you saw was the act of the the ~ key, which changes case in vi.
Now a lot of the extra keys have escape sequences ending in a ~ (eg ^[[14~
is F4 on some terminals).  Now, if vi doesn't recognise these extended
sequences as referring to a single key press, then it might treat it as
the commands ESCAPE followed by [1 (probably won't do anything) followed
by 4~  - ie it will change the case of the next 4 characters.

So if the OP saw "ROOT" (rather than "R00T") then this is a possibility for
what happened.

-- 

rgds
Stephen



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