Error related to vim colors on AWS EC2 [UPDATED]

E486: Pattern not found: \<IAMAdmin\>

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I’m using a custom color file in association with vim on my local laptop. I copied the same custom colors file to an AWS EC2 instance to try to match the colors and was altering it.

I try to apply the the custom colors:

vi somefile.txt and :colorscheme tr and I get this:

I don’t know what code is trying to find \ but that is not in my colors file or anything like it.

Just to see what would happen I added the missing XML tag to my file. What is odd is that I got an error and then the tag name got deleted when I exited the error and returned to the file but the < and > were still there.

I found a few references related to that E486 error code someone might want to look into. For example, search for E486 on Stack Exchange.

What is disturbing is that it is returning data not contained in my tr.vim colors file but that obviously exists *somewhere* on the system. So could someone use the colors file to get access to data they shouldn’t? I don’t know and don’t have more time to look into this.

I tried the default color scheme and some others and those worked per this article.

So I copied the default color scheme over my tr.vim file. That also worked.

Well, that was fun but I don’t have more time to mess with this. Strange indeed. Hopefully just a bug and nothing more. If you find something more, please credit this blog post or at least give it a few likes. :-)

Update…later I was editing my .aws/config file and I realized that I had name one of my users IAMAdmin and was referencing that MFA device in the config file. I wasn’t using that role and had no active session for that user at the time I got the error. I don’t know if that is related in some way.

In addition to the above, earlier today I saw that same reference to IAM admin but I wasn’t eciting or doing anything with colors.

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Teri Radichel | © 2nd Sight Lab 2023

About Teri Radichel:
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