Here's how to stop shell escapes from vi

[Brad Hansen]

In article <935 at mwtech.UUCP> martin at mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel) writes:
>If you have two minutes time, please try the following: 2000i-<esc>
>This should construct a line of 2000 characters, which is above the
>limits at least my vi (386/ix Rel 2.0.2) can handle. Then insert
>another character into this line ... and whoops, vi throws you into
>ex-mode.
>
>Nice feature - who would ever have thought? Possibly some user which
>you carefully tried to keep away from ex-prompts knows this little
>"feature" (who said it is a bug?).

Fallback to 'ex' mode when vi hits something beyond its capabilities 
is a well known feature of vi and the other editors based on ex, 
although it is admittedly not in the man pages.  What would you 
prefer, a core dump?

Brad Hansen                             att!attmail!hansenb
                                     or brad.hansen at att.com