I have been given some instructions in Vi to format some data. Since I'm new I was basically asked to hit ESC in Vi and then type the following in the on the bottom

:1
:$s/,/CTRL-V then while holding down CTRL press M/g

This would format a wall of text into a readable page.


I was wondering if:

a) There was a place I could go to online to learn what the :$s,/,/ symbols and characters where doing

b) I made a mistake once and now some of the characters in the file are highlighted in yellow. I was wondering if we could turn that off or reset the file....sorry my jargon is brutal. :-(

well the s// stuff ia a regular expression, there are millions of google hits for regular expression tutorials (Also called a regex or regexp)

being in yellow means you searched for it. e.g. in vi hitting /bum will search for bum and highlight all occurrences in yellow. Personally i just search for something that it won't find, e.g. /ewrdhjgklhjg to clear it, but any vi tutorial will tell you the proper way to clear it.

What are you trying to do? It looks like you are trying to convert commas to newlines, in which case it's

which means from line 1 to last line ($), substitute comma with Ctrl-V Ctrl-M (ie a new line). Do not put the space between ctrl-v ctrl-m, that's just to make it easier for you to read. The 'g' on the end means all occurrences on each line. By default it would only match/amend the first occurrence on each line.
The vim docs are at http://www.vim.org/ and are also on your system somewhere eg /usr/share/vim/vim62/doc (62 = version 6.2 : YMMV).