User received email concerning editor buffer

[Mike Smith_33]

I rebooted the system this past weekend and one of the users received the following email

A copy of an editor buffer of your file "856bantaclark.344193"
was saved when the system went down.
This buffer can be retrieved using the "recover" command of the editor.
An easy way to do this is to give the command "ex -r 856bantaclark.344193".
This works for "edit" and "vi" also.


He forwarded me three emails, two of which he is sure had be previously sent. He said all three were for old transactions. I am not exactly sure what happened here. System is hpux 11i pretty well patched. Any ideas?

[Bill Hassell]

Quite normal. When vi is abnormally terminated, the edited file may be in a fuzzy state. You may have typed a few :w commands during the edit, or worked on it for hours. So a trashed connection or rebooted PC can destroy a lot of work. The error message says "system went down" because in the old days, connections were pretty stable (copper wire to a terminal). It really means 'when the vi session was abnormally terminated'. That user apparently was editing a file and walked away, leaving the vi session running, or more typically, the PC window was deleted ('X'ed out).

The user can ignore the message or follow the instructions:

vi -r 856bantaclark.344193

and then save the file.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Mike:

The recovery files for 'vi' sessions will be found in '/var/preserve'. The name given to the file is a generated filename like "Exaaa26910". However, you can determine what it was by performing:

# strings /var/preserve/Exaaa26910 | head

...for example. The filename that was being editted is in the first line.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Mike Smith_33]

First off, thanks for the reply which seems plausible and parallels what I initially thought. What doesn't make sense is that the user was not editing these files at the time. One file was from the 1/18/07, one from 1/19/07 and he believes from December 06. One would those files be emailed when they were not open on 2/10 during the outage?

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi (again) Mike:

Yes, the reboot would find old editor buffers. The reason is that '/sbin/init.d/clean_ex' is executed during normal startup sequences. Have a look this scirpt.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Mike Smith_33]

This apparently is part of the normal startup and is done by /sbin/init.d/ex which apparently recovers editor crash files.