less and vi fail on file whose name begins with +

Thomas Mueller mueller23 at insightbb.com
Mon Jul 16 05:03:32 UTC 2012


I notice in my latest build of FreeBSD 9.0-STABLE (#11), a problem with less and vi with files whose name begins with +.

These files occur in /var/db/pkg/(pkg-name)/

For instance, if I cd /var/db/pkg/png-1.4.8
and type 
less +DESC 
I get

Missing filename ("less --help" for help)

but if I type the filename with full path, or even 
less ./+DESC 
it works OK

I also tried going to /tmp and
echo abcdefg > +junk1.txt
and the same bug with less showed up (no problem with echo).

I tried vi instead of less, not really wanting to edit the file,
and vi tried to open a temporary file on /tmp with a strange name.

Has anybody noticed this bug?  It affects i386 and amd64 at least.

I have no access to test on other architectures.

If this bug is found, we no doubt want it to be squashed before 9.1-RELEASE.

Tom



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