Solaris

I'm facing a peculiar issue when using vi on solaris. When i open a file using vi & search for a string pattern & if that pattern is not found & if i exit, vi exits with return value 1. (Checked the return value with 'echo $?' ).
When the string is found, vi exits with return value 0.

This however is not an issue with vim on solaris.
Also, vi does not show this behavior on other ( e.g. rhel, suse) setups.

Anybody can help me regarding this issue ???

Why does it matter what vi's return value is? Is it part of a script?

Yes, it is a part of a script ....

I would choose sed or ex in a script. The vi is too screen oriented for script life, unless you are into firing your optical neurons a lot, usually not a cash deliverable.

Do you need to know what happened inside vi using the $? 0/1 behavior?

BTW, I have a vi wrapper I call vix:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/ksh

(
 stty -a | sed '
        s/^/ /
        t a
        :a
        s/.* rows = \([1-9][0-9]*\).*/\1/
        t
        d
        ' | read zr

# echo $zr >&2

 if [ "$zr" = "" ]
 then
  zr=25
 fi

 while [ "$zr" != -1 ]
 do
  zr=$(( $zr - 1 ))
  echo >/dev/tty
  done

 vi "$@"

 exit 0
)

Interesting. You didn't mention the bigger picture of what you are trying to do, but maybe you would be better off using grep to see if a string exists in a file, or sed if you need to change that string?

Tell us what the vi part does for your data.

It can be argued this is actually a vim non conformance and Solaris vi is behaving correctly by sticking to the POSIX specification (vi) which states:

Code:

EXIT STATUS
 The following exit values are returned: 

 0
       Successful completion.
 >0
       An error occurred.