Time savers

less to vim

When you are viewing a file with less, just press v to open the file in your default editor. When you are finished, save in the editor and you are sent back to less.

Make sure you set your default editor either in your shell or .bashrc:

VISUAL=vi               # .bashrc
EDITOR=vi

export EDITOR=vi        # shell env

Edit files that contain a given string

Use grep with command substitution to edit with vim all files that contain a specific string:

• cycle through the files in vim with :bn (forward) and :bp (backwards)

vim $(grep -l <string> *)                                   # search pwd
vim $(grep -lr <string> *)                                  # search dir tree
vim $(find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l <string>)   # faster search for larger dir tree

Creating empty files

Create them with touch or echo. Prefer touch:

touch file{0..1000}.txt
echo -n > empty             # -n option omits newline char

Process file one line at a time

Use this loop to read a file, one line at a time:

• cat file sends the contents of file to stdout
• while read line is a while loop
  • read takes input from stdin
  • line is the variable

cat file | while read line; do
    # do something
    echo "$line"
done