[Novalug] Unable to terminate a vi program

Nino Pereira pereira@speakeasy.net
Sun Apr 26 17:05:52 EDT 2009


Charlie,

here are my panic buttons. They may work for you too.

1: do 'ps -aux'. This gives you a long list of programs
that run on the machine. Find the one that's giving
problems (in your case: vi or more likely vim), find
the Process ID (the number in the second column, say 12345) and do
'kill -9 12345'

That should make the offending process disappear.

2: For really serious problems (screen locked up, greek or korean
letters when you type latin letters), reboot.

HTH,

Nino


Charles M Howe wrote:
> List,
> 
> Elementary problem, I guess, but enough to puzzle me.
> 
> I was in my home directory. I did
> 
>   ls --color=auto -R ch*>ch-filelist
> 
> I meant to do
> 
>   vi ch-filelist
> 
> but I got careless and actually did
> 
>   vi ch*>ch-filelist
> 
> Now I'm stuck. It comes back
> 
>   vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal
> 
> but I haven't been able to do anythging. Cntrl-C doesn't work. Neither
> does ZZ. What can I do? and where is it going?
> 
> Charlie
> 
> 
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> 
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