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When booting FreeBSD (I use 8.4-amd64) in single-user mode, mounting root filesystem in read/write mode and trying to vi some text file, I get all of this file's contents in one line. This makes vi unable to edit text configs.

When running multi-user, all works OK.

How can I fix this?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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It's because not all config files are read during boot in single-user mode.

In this particular case the problem is in the TERM environment variable not being set properly. To fix this, just type 

export TERM=xterm

and vi will work fine until you reboot again.

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    Colleagues also say they encountered cases with FreeBSD 8.4 when setting TERM=xterm didn't helped to solve the problem, but setting TERM=vt100 did.
    – AntonioK
    Jul 14, 2014 at 10:03
  • vt220 should work as well.
    – schaiba
    Dec 15, 2015 at 7:20

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