Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi there.

I am trying to write a script that will be used to record actions. eg

Code:

 
# ./worklog -a "Peformed a memory upgrade on this box after we experiened a DIMM failure"

at which point the script will log to file called /var/worklog prepending the comment with the users name and date, with the most recent comments on top

eg

Code:

 
# cat /var/worklog
 
**2011-08-10  Peter Jones**
 
Peformed a memory upgrade on this box after we experiened a DIMM failure
------------------
 
**2011-08-09  John Smith**
 
Did some other stuff blah blah 
 
-------------------
...
...
...

Now this is all easy enough to do apart from when I want to get multiline blocks of text (eg pasting from an email) then command line falls over.

Is it possible for me to invoke a vi session from by say running a -v flag as opposed to a -a which will drop me into vi, i can paste what I want and the mere action of saving and quiting the session would take the input and process it as it would do if i entered the comment on the command line

Ive seen this done before for example on subversion when you do an 'svn commit' it opens a vi session and when you save/quit, it takes those comments.

Is this hard to code, I can tseem to find any info on how to do it ?

any help would be greatly appreciated

???

Code:

tmp=`tempfile` # or tmp=/tmp/$0.$$
# add, append something to $tmp
vi "$tmp"
# do something with $tmp
rm "$tmp"

thanks (i guess it was simpler that i originally thought )