Any idea to repeat an action to all the lines in vi...

suppose i want to delete the first word from all the lines in VI .. how would i do it ?

in general i am also looking for a way to apply a action to all the lines in VI .

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If u r not confused today , u r not thinking clearly!!!

Hi,

If you want to repeat an action, you use the . (dot)...

Check this out for more !
http://csep1.phy.ornl.gov/unix_guide...00000000000000

I know that you can use the "." period for repeating the same action...

If you use the dw command in vi to remove a word, then use "." it will repeat the action. then navigate down with the j key.



If you have 9 or less columns in a file awk will work great...


awk '{ print $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7, $8, $9 }' < file.in > file.out


If you have lines of text with more than 9 fields. I cant think of a way to do it for the whole file without calling a program from the :sh prompt.

__________________
My brain is your brain

Any idea to apply the same action to the multiple lines in a one go ... Suppose i delete 2 words from a line and want to repeat the same action to the next 1000 lines in a one go ???


Thanks

__________________
If u r not confused today , u r not thinking clearly!!!

Hi,

vi is a very powerful tool. explore it

to do something over a number of lines you need to use

:<startline>,<endline> command

besides this vim provides recording.

however, i wud suggest you that try to use some external scripts like awk, sed etc to do such things.

__________________
War doesnt determine who is right, it determines who is left

Q1:

Example1:
cat testfile
111 222 333 444
aaa bbb ccc ddd
111 222 333 444

In vi mode, step to remove first word.
press 'Esc'
: prompt appear
then type
%s/.[^ ]* *//
"%" is represented to whole document

Example2:
cat testfile
111 222 333 444
aaa bbb ccc ddd
111 222 333 444

In vi, step to remove lines selectively

__________________
tikual :)

oh sorry, press wrong key to post the previous message.

The remains are shown as follows:

press 'Esc'
: prompt appear
then type
.,1000s/.[^ ]* .[^ ]* //

it will remove first two words of each line from "current line to line 1000"(.,1000).

__________________
tikual :)