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Re: vim 7 gives error when editing /etc/hosts
Harig, Mark wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com
[mailto:cygwin-owner@cygwin.com] On Behalf Of Frank Fesevur
Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 5:35 AM
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: vim 7 gives error when editing /etc/hosts
Hi,
When I try to edit /etc/hosts with vim7, it gives this error:
E303: Unable to open swap file for "hosts", recovery impossible
The file can be edited, but this never happened with 6.4
vim appears to be unable to follow some links.
The following steps lead to the above error for me, also.
$ touch "c:\foo.txt"
$ ln -s "c:\foo.txt" bar.txt
$ vim bar.txt # vim reports the swap-file error
On my computer, and I suspect on yours, /etc/hosts is a
symbolic link to Windows 'hosts' file:
$ ls -ln /etc/hosts
lrwxrwxrwx 1 13558 545 37 Apr 4 18:11 /etc/hosts ->
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Curiously, the link does not cause an error if it was created using
"cygwin" syntax:
$ ln -fs /c/foo.txt bar.txt # assumes that you've set the cygdrive
prefix to "/"
$ vim bar.txt # No swap-file error is reported.
----
That doesn't seem to explain why vim 6.4 worked. Vim should
be functioning as a POSIX app, and the difference in the pathname
shouldn't make any difference as it should be filtered and converted
by the cygwin layer before vim sees it.
It seems like something else may be in play.
-l
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