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.