vi command to find and delete all lines beginning with a character

geomatt · 12-19-2004, 04:00 PM

Anyone know how I can delete all of the lines in a file that begin with some arbitary character?
Been poring over the vi documentation and various online sources of info, but I can't figure it out....

-geo

mjrich · 12-19-2004, 04:06 PM

You could always use Grep in reverse mode, within or without Vim, such as

Code:

grep -vE ^# inputfile > outputfile

where # is/are your desired character(s) at the start of the line...

Cheers,

mj

geomatt · 12-19-2004, 04:12 PM

Hey great thanks. Doesn't need to be within vi as long as it works.

-geo

mjrich · 12-19-2004, 04:14 PM

Great

If you're a real Vim afficionado, you would of course just run it from within the shell mode of Vim.

Cheers,

mj

slakmagik · 12-19-2004, 07:04 PM

Just use ex mode -

:g/^x.*$/d

with 'x' being your arbitrary character.

geomatt · 12-19-2004, 07:19 PM

Thanks. I'll try that too. Just starting to learn a bit more about what can be done in vi....
-geo

SlowMindThinkin · 12-19-2004, 09:12 PM

A decade or so ago, I was pretty good with vi. I do not believe you can do what you want with vi. You might be able to with sed, however.

homey · 12-19-2004, 09:43 PM

Quote:

:g/^x.*$/d

The method which digiot shows works quite well.

slakmagik · 12-20-2004, 03:30 AM

Speaking of sed, I actually messed that up slightly -

:g/^x/d

is all that's necessary. d will delete all of the addressed lines, so the rest is unnecessary - I guess I put that from habit because I use sed and 's' a lot. Either one works, but it's wasted typing in this case.