[CLUE-Tech] vi search/replace question

[Jeff Cann]

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On Thursday 22 April 2004 10:54 am, Dave Price wrote:
> For example, I want to remove all the lines the start with a particular
> character, perhaps #, (so the regex to find the lines would be ^# ...
>
> How can I tell vi to replace the regex and the rest of the line with
> 'nothing'?

Dave,

You can do this in vi, for line 30:

:30 /^#.*//

the ^# (as you know) is the front of line (hidden) character and the comment #
the . matches any single character
the * modifies the . to match any number of . characters
the replacment is simply two slashes // which is 'nothing'

or for every line in a file:

:%s /^#.*//

>
> I know I could do this easily by piping the file out to grep -i, but
> lets just say I don't have a good grep available under this OS.... Or I
> just want to learn to do this entirely in vi.

A quicker way to do this for a number of files is using perl:

$ perl -pi -e 's/^#.*//' (list of files)

Later,
Jeff

- -- 
"Faith that does not affect a person's culture is a faith not fully embraced, 
not entirely thought out, not faithfully lived."
- - Pope John Paul II

http://isuma.org/


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