UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Is there a way that I can position cursor at say line 23, column 2?

Thank you in advance.

Code:

<ESC>:23<ENTER>2|

Cheers
ZB

I inserted the code just as you told me to, and when I run the script (horolog), this is what I get:

A file or directory in the path name does not exist.
./horolog[7]: ESC: 0403-016 Cannot find or open the file. Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you.

I think we are communicating at cross-purposes here.

What I gave you is not code. They are keystrokes to be entered during an interactive editing session using vi.

Are you trying to script a file edit?? vi is an interactive editor - you can script edits with "ed", however.

Or are you trying to open vi at a specific place in a file? If so you can try "vi +23 filename" to open the file at the 23rd line, but to my knowledge you cannot tell vi to open at a particular column.

With vim you can specify a "-s" option with a script. E.g.
vim -s script_file filename

I did, however, find the script option very unpredictable, for example, to move to the 2nd char of the 23rd line, I needed the command string "23G|k|l" inside a script. The extra "up" keystroke (k) doesn't make sense, but was needed to get it working properly.

If you want to place the cursor while execution of a shell script, use "tput cup 23 2 " in the script while executing the script you will see that the cursor is in 23 /2.

ex: tput cup 23 2; echo "Enter Your Name..."

just try this otherwise if you want to go to 23 line and second character while scripting the shell in vi, the previous solution is right.



raguram R

I was running a script written thru the vi editor. I tried the suggestion made by Raguram, and it worked. Thank you soooooooo much.

Latha

try all the options of tput. Its a nice command to play with cursor positioning.

raguram R