Your JoeDog got a new laptop – happy nice time!

He bought if from System 76 with Ubuntu 13.10 preinstalled. No major work to get this bad boy configured, right? Well….

In a previous life Your JoeDog was a UNIX guy. He earned his chops on AIX before moving to an HPUX shop. On commercial UNIX, AT&T’s korn shell is king. In the 1990s, it showed its flexibility by accomodating both vi and emacs editing. But c’mon. Any UNIX geek worth his salt ran it in vi-mode. Along the way, JoeDog developed a habit of completing filenames by hitting the esc key twice. /usr/lo esc-esc and he was in local. Bash weenies arrive at the same location by hitting the tab key. Only one stroke they say. Perhaps. But Your JoeDog gets emotional satisfation from banging esc twice. [pop, pop]

Now unfortunately, Ubuntu didn’t include ksh on his shiny new laptop. No problem, ‘apt-get install ksh’ Unfortunately that version didn’t support esc-completion. No problem, ‘apt-get install pdksh’ And ah-way we guh …. WTF? That didn’t support it either.

That’s okay. Your JoeDog is pretty adept with a compiler. He snagged pdksh from source and rolled his own. There’s a couple things to remember when you do this: 1. make sure the shell you install is in /etc/shells or you won’t be permitted to login. 2. You need to add ‘set -o vi-esccomplete’ to your $HOME/.profile in order to achieve esc-esc completion.

During the build, the following error was encountered:

gcc -c -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -g -O table.c
./siglist.sh "gcc -E -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I." < ./siglist.in > tmpsiglist.out
sort: cannot read: +2n: No such file or directory
make: *** [siglist.out] Error 1

Well that sucks. Your JoeDog punched that error into the Google machines and boy did he get an earful. There were plenty of people who encountered that error. They were frustrated and turned to the Internets for help. Hey, anybody know how to correct this? Oh, the Internets had opinions all right. You know what they had to say? “ksh sucks, use bash!” Well, that’s certainly one thought. Here’s another one: fsck you! Flies gotta fly. Bees gotta be. And UNIX grey beards gotta esc-esc.

So the Internets weren’t much help but the sort’s documentation helped shed some light. To fix the error above, you need to go POSIX. So before you run ‘make’ run this command:

export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209

Are you with us so far? If you’re an esc-esc guy, we’re pretty sure you are. With his new pdksh in place, Your JoeDog was esc-esc’ing all over the place … until he tried to log in to a new Xsession. WTF? Basically, he was locked out of his brand new laptop.

To get into single-user mode in Ubuntu, hold down the shift key while it’s booting. That will provide a menu through which you can navigate to the root shell. Once you’re in the root shell, you’ll have to mount file systems read-write in order to fix the errors that locked you out of your system. Here’s how you mount root as read-write:

mount -o remount,rw /

Here’s what Your JoeDog discovered inside his $HOME/.xsession-errors file:

/usr/sbin/lightdm-session: 15: set: Illegal option -o vi-esccomplete

JESUS H. CHRISTMAS STOCKING!!1!1!!!

So the directive that provides the feature he wants prevents him from logging in. If that’s not a Catch-22, then what is? Since we rolled our own shell, let’s just alter its code so it does our bidding. Unfortunately, the pdksh source wasn’t the most intuitive read but Your JoeDog slogged through it so you won’t have to.

On line 1142 of vi.c you’ll find this:

 case Ctrl('['): /* some annoying at&t ksh's */
    if (!Flag(FVIESCCOMPLETE))
        return -1; 
 case '\': /* at&t ksh */

Do you see that? Try searching for the word “annoying” in the code. Okay, to do esc-esc completion by default without resorting to ‘set -o vi-esccomplete’ change that block of code so it looks like this:

 case Ctrl('['): /* some annoying at&t ksh's */
 case '\': /* at&t ksh */

Now esc-esc falls down to esc- and its behavior is the same.

THE IMPATIENT PERSON’S GUIDE TO MAKING esc-esc FILENAME COMPLETION THE DEFAULT BEHAVIOR IN PDKSH

1. Download pdksh-5.2.14

2. Unzip the tarball: gunzip -9cd pdksh-5.2.14.tar.gz | tar -xvf –

3. Edit vi.c

On line 1142 of vi.c you’ll find this:

case Ctrl('['): /* some annoying at&t ksh's */
    if (!Flag(FVIESCCOMPLETE))
        return -1; 
 case '\': /* at&t ksh */

Make it look like this:

 case Ctrl('['): /* some annoying at&t ksh's */
 case '\': /* at&t ksh */

4. Run: ./configure

5. Run: export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209

6. Run: make

7. Run: cp ksh /bin/pdksh

8. Run: cp ksh.1 /usr/share/man/man1/pdksh.1

9. VERY IMPORTANT: add /bin/pdksh to /etc/shells

10. In /etc/password change your shell to /bin/pdksh

Happy double-escaping.