Shell Programming and Scripting

I know this is straying from the original topic a little, but I wanted to say that the functionality mentioned by Kelam_Magnus is really cool and powerful. The command is ! and like many vi commands, is followed by a movement to indicate how much text to operate on. In this case, the defined amount of text is passed to the OS for processing, and all the passed text is replaced by the output of the processing.

Say you have a paragraph of plain text comments, and some lines are too long, some too short. Put your cursor at start of paragraph and type !} which says process all text thru EOP, and when prompted at the colon prompt, type adjust or adjust -m66, and the text will be replaced by the output of /bin/adjust.

Or create a script called addhori.sh:
awk '{printf "%9d%9d%9d%9d\n",$1,$2,$3,$1+$2+$3}'

In vi, place your cursor on the first of the four lines:

5 5 5
3 4 5
22 22 22
9 9 9

and this time let's process the current line plus next 3 lines: !3j
and at the colon prompt, type: addhori.sh

The four lines will be replaced with the awk output, in this case it will be the same 4 lines but formatted and with a total column added. It does not have to be line-per-line replacement. All lines could be replaced with a single line, or the 4 lines above could become the same 4 lines plus a total line below them (addvert.sh), each line could become two lines, whatever.

And of course, just type "u" to undo.

And for added functionality, some of the scripts I write for vi external processing utilize passed parameters.

Thanks for all the help it really works slick!

I always take compliments!

Thanks for the kudos!

Yes, I am a firm believer that vi is greatly underused and vastly misunderstood as a tool for Admins.

Everyone should have a required course in vi. You can run scripts from within a file that you are editing, go and vi another file and copy in the changed file and then :wq! the one you modified! then save the changes that you copied into the original file.

VI is awesome!

Thanks to everyone for all the help. I do have a few questions. I am using the csplit command such as the following

csplit -f small.head -n 4 MOORDERS '%^COHEAD%' '/^COHEAD/' '{4}'

My problem is that I don't know how many "COHEAD" there will be in the file, sometime just one, other times many more. How can I get around having to specifiy how many time it should repeat? (i.e. "4")

Also, the file I am testing has six "COHEAD" in it and in order to get them all into separate files I have to set the count to 4, why is this and not 6?

Thanks, Methos

The -n option on csplit is for the following:

-n number
Use number decimal digits to form filenames for the
file pieces. The default is 2.


RTM - it works.

Thanks, but I don't quite understand what you mean. The "4" I am referring is the one at the end of the statement. When I change this value, it outputs more or less files, that is unless I am completely off the mark.

Is there some wild card I can use to make it more flexible?

Thanks

I got it to where I can pass in a variable, still don't know why it is less than the number of occurances though. thanks everyone.

csplit -f small.head -n 4 MOORDERS '%^COHEAD%' '/^COHEAD/' {$1}


C-Ya, Methos