Some Tips & Tricks for "VI Editor"

[Rich Wright]

Delete every line with
:%g//d

Sort the file
:%!sort

[Shahbaz_1]

Thanks, every body

Absolutely greate inputs.


Regards
Shah

[Rob Saunders]

A couple of additional tips,

1) To write to a file when you don't actually own it:

:w ! su root -c 'cat > %'

(This will prompt for root's password and allow you to overwrite the file)

2) To write to contents of a file to a shell command line (stepping through a large script for example)

:5,50w ! ksh -s

(The above example writes lines 5 through 50 to a korn shell

Additionally, you might be able to assign these to function keys depending on your system...

[Shahbaz_1]

Hi friends,
Really "vi" is very powerful "editor".

Once again, I thanks, everybody for their great contributions.

Please make this Question "vi - Tips & Tricks" of the forum, a single point of reference for "vi editor".

After the Bob's input, I feel there are so many powerful commands in vi.

So please continue your inputs and unhide the powerful features of "vi editor"


Regards
Shah

[Carsten Krege]

One of my favourite commands is to delete the "^M" characters at the end of a file. You get them when transferring ASCII files from Unix to a PC using "bin" settings in ftp.

:1,$s/CTRL-V CTRL-M$//g

Carsten

[Shahbaz_1]

Hi,
How to ignore the case, while searching text.
e.g.
when I want to search say word "hp" in a file

/hp, it does not search for HP or Hp/hP.


Thanks & Regards
Shah

[Stefan Schulz]

Hi,

to ignore case do:

:set ic

Do your search. If you want to set it back, do:

: setz noic

Regards Stefan

[Chandrakumar Karunamoor]

Hi Shah,

:s/old/new/|s/abc/xyz/
to give two substitute commands.

:s/$/,/ 14
substiutes the last character with comma for 14 lines. Equivalent to :.,+13s/$/,/

:/kohli/-1 s/^/Father of Indian IT/
searches for Kohli (assuming you have :se ic) forward from you current line and the substitue command is executed on the line before it.

:/^Warning/;/^Warning d
deletes the second occurrence of the line starting with Warning. /^Warning/ ; // d gives the same result. Also
:12;/string/ is a valid address.

:1,$j
for joining all the lines.
:s/|/CTRL+V CTRL+M/g
substiutes the '|' with the newline character.

Hope this helps.
Thanks,
Chandrakumar