Editing on the serial console

[bob prohaska]

On Thu, Mar 07, 2019 at 12:10:11PM +0200, Konstantin Belousov wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 07, 2019 at 05:08:07PM +1030, O'Connor, Daniel wrote:
> > 
> > > On 7 Mar 2019, at 14:24, bob prohaska <fbsd at www.zefox.net> wrote:
> > > 
> > > Editing files in single-user mode on the serial console 
> > > is non-trivial. Both vi and ee have problems displaying 
> > > the file, ed doesn't really try so it works but isn't
> > > much fun. Is there a better option?  When the machine 
> > > boots single-user it reports "can't read /etc/termcap", 
> > > is something misconfigured?
> > 
> > /etc/termcap is a symlink to /usr/share/misc/termcap - if you mount /usr (read only is fine) then it should work.
> > 
> > ie since you are in single user mode only / has been mounted.
> > 
> > If / and /usr are the same FS them something else is wrong :)
> 
> There is /etc/termcap.small, and I remember our libcurses uses TERMCAP
> env variable to point to the termcap file.

It never occurred to me that /etc/termcap might actually live elsewhere.
That's almost certainly the problem. Would there be any drawback to 
simply moving the file back to /etc ?  

Thanks to everybody,

bob prohaska