There are some googlable ways to feed a list of filenames to vim, but I
stumble on weird results.
With my filelist, I try to do
cat list | xargs vim
...to edit the files listed in the file "list". Here's what happens:
[root@lasso2 tempdir]# ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 17 18:28 a
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 17 18:28 b
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3 May 17 18:31 c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12 May 17 18:43 list
[root@lasso2 tempdir]# cat list
./a
./b
./c
[root@lasso2 tempdir]# cat list | xargs vim
3 files to edit
Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal
Ok, so far, so good. And after this, the file a opens, as expected.
However, the contents show as all uppercase. And everything I write is
uppercase too. I can move to the next file (:n) even though the command
shows as uppercase (:N). I cannot quit vim, however. When I do ":q", I
get blank screen, and I have to close the terminal window.
If I do instead
cat list | xargs less
...it works as expected.
And with
cat list | xargs vi
...(in a fresh terminal window), the editing goes just perfect, but when
I quit vi, the terminal will not show the commands I write, and the
display gets garbled (no newlines etc.).
What is happening?
- Jussi