On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, der Mouse wrote:
I trust there will be a way to shut this off? I ran into a real headache on a Linux system which I eventually tracked down to its wc being UTF-8 by default and exiting (silently!) as soon as it ran into an invalid UTF-8 sequence. This broke rather severely when I, coming from a traditional Unix background, used those tools to manipulate bytes rather than characters.
I can share an anecdote on that, which I recently run into with nvi compiled from pkgsrc on a Debian system: When saving a file from a non-default locale (say, when you've read a Latin1 file with UTF8 as default), nvi starts saving the file, and aborts when it comes to the Latin1 character. After that, the on-disk file is truncated, and the file in the editor cannot be saved. ``Thank you for killing my file!''
- Hubert