Is there any way to pipe through multiple external commands in vim?

For example, I would like to sort all lines in the buffer and then run unique on them.

Example of what I would like to do from the : prompt in normal mode (does not work as written):

:% !sort | uniq

The problem I am running into is that vim uses the pipe symbol to run consecutive commands.

Writing scripts or consecutive commands is possible, but I would like to avoid that.

Hi,

I probably misunderstand the question, but if I copy/paste the above command (:% !sort | uniq) into a vim session it works as expected (all lines are sorted uniqely).

Tried on an old suse (8.2) and LFS, both work. I don't have RH.

Please tell us a bit more about what's going wrong.

Thanks for your response.

Now, I can't repro it either, I must have had an extra % on the command line, though with a command that simple I find that hard to believe.

My original problem was that I was trying to filter text through awk, resulting in an error (which I should have written down) that I could repro with the more simple command. After reviewing again, it was the % in the awk placeholder text that was originally causing the problem, with vim complaining about an "Empty file name".

Example (that now works):
:% !sort | uniq | awk '{printf("X\%s\n", $0);}'

Even though the printf format string is in single quotes, the % must be escaped as \%. It looks like vim uses a very different command text parser than bash.