Bug-hunting at this level of detail is new to me, so forgive me if any of this is rubbish. It seems to me that:
Debian 4.0 was broken in the sense that scripts edited by its version of nano could fail. It seems the backslash continuation line syntax was not preserved. This old version of nano converted LF to CR-LF breaking continuation lines in the script. The nano on my Ubuntu 10.04 (etc/debian_version says squeeze/sid) will do the test edit on the same script with fewer diff entries and crucially for my purposes, these are restricted to comments. On inspection, the current nano converts CR-LF to LF thereby 'correcting' problems introduced by alien editors, producing a WYSIWYG version text file. This newer nano successfully applied the required edits; the edited script works on the 4.0 system. But any file change caused by loading, null edit, then saving should probably be documented prominently in the man page. Apologies if it is - I could not find it when I looked. Thanks for your time on this. Chris -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
