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On 5/17/2011 12:19 PM, Jussi Hirvi wrote:
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?
Do this instead:
vi `cat list`
cat list - gives the output of the file which is the three filenames `cat list` - executes this command and feeds its output to the input of your next command
So the resulting command ends up being "vi ./a ./b ./c" which opens up the 'a' file and you will be able to move to the next file with the :n option.
xargs is effectively running a for loop on each unique item in the output of the previous command (cat list). vi expects to be run on one file at a time and needs to be associated with a terminal session in prder to be able to get input from you (either text or commands) to apply to the file.
- -- David Goldsmith