Re: Strange behavior about pattern matching on manual pages [FIXED]

Alan Somers <asomers_at_freebsd.org> wrote:

> > Yes, it certainly is.  Are you sure this is actually a bug in less, or is
> > it just weird-but-intended behavior when less is emulating some old version
> > of more?  It would be worth comparing our less sources to upstream's to see
> > what differences have crept in, and svn blaming them to see why.

Firstly, apologies for the delay in replying - I've been away.

I was planning on investigating further, which is why I hadn't yet formally
submitted it. Your info would have been a useful next step to follow, so cheers.

> I finally traced down the origin of this weird behavior.  It dates from
> FreeBSD r60816, which imported NetBSD's r1.6 (from CVS), which fixed NetBSD
> PR 227.  While your patch fixes the problem by_at_meetlost.com reported, it
> regresses the problem described by PR 227.  So I don't think we can commit
> it as-is.

Thanks for doing that. Of course, it's fine to not apply the patch as in this case.

> http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/usr.bin/less/less/Attic/forwback.c.diff?r1=1.5&r2=1.6&only_with_tag=MAIN&f=h
> https://gnats.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=227
>
> For reference, I'll restate a reproduction case for PR 227:
> 1) Size your terminal to 25 lines
> 2) jot 20 > ~/tmp/20lines.txt
> 3) jot 100 120 1 > /tmp/20lines.2.txt
> 4) more /tmp/20lines.*
> 5) At the prompt, press spacebar to display the second file.  The first
> file should remain in the scrollback buffer.

Thanks again. I'll check the PR's, other patches, and your test-case will help greatly.
I'll post again when I find a better overall solution.

Cheers! Jamie