Hi everybody,
Does anyone knows how to do this vi trick ?

For example:
------------
I have a text file containing 100 lines of the following characters:
aaaaa
bbbbb
ccccc
ddddd
eeeee
---
---
---
etc

Question:
---------
If I open this text file using vi and I'd like to insert a word 'test' (for example) at the end of each line. Is there a one line vi command that can perform this task at one go, considering I've so many lines (100 lines) ?

I do know that I can use '.' to repeat the last executed command, but for 100 lines ?

Please kindly help.
Thanks a lot.

Hi:

while in vi, press the colon, :

and type:

g/$/s//test/g

Regards,

Nails

In this command,

What is the $ (dollar sign) meant??

Thanks a lot Nails for the tips. I have yet to try it out, but I'm confident that it will solve my puzzle.

By the way, doesn't it need to specify how many time the task should be perform ? Let's say if I want to add that word (test) for the first top 50 lines only. How could that be done ?

- Peter

:1,50s/$/test

meaning from lines 1 to 50, substitute end of line with the word "test". (vi doesn't actually remove the linefeed, "$" just refers to a logical end-of-line.)

Thanks a lot William.
Much appreciated for your help.

Have a nice day.

- Peter

Hi,

Does anyone knows where to dig out in more details and of course with examples (if possible) on how to use this vi additional commands / variables ? Any good online reference or website ?

Please kindly help.
Thanks.

- Peter

Peter:

The vi book I like best is:

Learning the vi Editor by Linda Lamb and Arnold Robbins published by O'Reilly.

There's a ton of vi links on the web. I like this document from Berkeley:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~janp/Help/onlinedocs.html#vi

Regards,

Nails

I'll second that vote for the O'Reilly book.

Notice that vi is called "vi" or sometimes "Vi" but not "VI". Also there seems to be an odd tradition in the documentation of claiming that it is pronounced "Vee-Eye", when in fact everyone has always called it "Vye". Rather like pronouncing ".wav" as "Dot Wave". Strange...

Before I somehow managed to mislay it, the book I swore by was "Unix in a Nutshell", also by O'Reilly.

It doesn't teach anything, but is an excellent reference manual of everything Unix... from vi to sed to awk to ksh or csh to pattern matching... just about everything you need to know about Unix is in there somewhere, without too much waffle.

Sean

Hi guys,

Sorry for the late reply.
I just wanted to say thanks so ... so much for helping me and for those extra information. Much appreciated.

Keep up the good work guys!!!

- Peter