You’re right, if you leave out the extra ESC it might work better!

The "condom-with-a-hole-in-it” fix didn’t say exactly which characters to actually type, or even that you had to use emacs, but who in their right mind would use vi to edit a binary (and isn’t already running a root emacs anyway)?

-Don


> On 2 Nov 2017, at 19:32, Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:
> 
> Don Hopkins wrote:
>> emacs /usr/ucb/sendmail (or whatever directory you keep all your
>> stinky hippie software in), ^S DEBUG ESC M-b ^D ^Q ^@ ^X ^S (that is,
>> null out the first character of the “DEBUG” command).
> 
> This piqued my interest, because exiting incremental search with ESC
> doesn't look familiar to me (unless in ITS).  I tried it in a recent
> Emacs, and just got "ESC M-b is undefined".  Emacs 18 was contemporary
> with the Morris Worm.  Would it allow ESC?