UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

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 .

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.

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

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.

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

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).