Comments on End Point Blog: VIM Tip of the Day: running external commands in a...

@depesz & Jon: Yes! Sorting is one of @gorthx's (G...

2009-03-10T13:14:00.000-04:00

@depesz & Jon: Yes! Sorting is one of @gorthx's (Gabrielle Roth) favorite uses :)

Thanks for sharing!

Yes, indeed. I must have missed that part somehow....

2009-03-10T12:35:00.000-04:00

Yes, indeed. I must have missed that part somehow. Apologies for the noise.

Chris, that's the final example Selena gave in the...

2009-03-10T12:33:00.000-04:00

Chris, that's the final example Selena gave in the original post, isn't it?

And in a homologous fashion, one can read the resu...

2009-03-10T12:31:00.001-04:00

And in a homologous fashion, one can read the results of an external command by passing the command to run to the :r command like so:

:r !/bin/ls

Yes, and you can also send line ranges rather than...

2009-03-10T12:31:00.000-04:00

Yes, and you can also send line ranges rather than the whole buffer, for example, lines 4-7:

:4,7! sort -u

or line 4 through end of file:

:4,$! sort -u

And when a visual selection is active, that will automatically be the range used:

:! sort -u

you can also use "%!" to pass current buffer via s...

2009-03-10T12:24:00.000-04:00

you can also use "%!" to pass current buffer via some filtering command.

For example : %!nl - to number lines (different from :set nu), :%!wc to check word count on current buffer, :%!tac to reverse order of lines, and so on.