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Re: "man" command made easy?



On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 03:41:01PM -0700, Paul Mackinney wrote:
| D-Man uttered:
| > 
| > [I haven't been following most of this thread, but]
| > 
| > On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 10:59:23AM -0700, Paul Mackinney wrote:
| > | Night before last I ran 'find /usr/doc -name "index.html" >foo.txt' and
| > | then spent 2 hours adding links from foo.txt to my local home/start
| > 
| > 2 hours!?  Wow.  Learn vi(m) or some other advanced editor.  If you
| > have that foo.txt with each filename on its own line the following
| > will take very little time to create a web page of links out of it.
| 
| Vim is indeed my editor of choice. The 2 hours was mostly because I got 
| distracted reading & checking out the stuff I found. But my edits 

Oh, ok.  That's better.  Two hours reading docs, not two hours
creating HTML links.

(BTW, thanks guys for those other generation techniques)

| weren't nearly as slick as what you suggest.
| 
| Thanks to a conversation at a BAD (Bay Area Debian) meeting last week, I
| was clued in to visual mode. Here's what I did:
| 1. At the first line, type 'v' to enter visual mode.
| 2. Scroll to the last line, type ':'
| 3. Vim starts the command text for you. Append
| s/^/<a href="file:\/\//g <enter>
| 
| 4. Repeat the command, this time appending
| s/$/\"> DESCR <\/a>/g
| 
| This turned a line like 
| /usr/share/doc/apache/manual/mod/index.html
| 
| into
| <a href="file:///usr/share/doc/apache/manual/mod/index.html"> DESCR </a>

Yes, visual mode is great when you want to operate on a subset of the
buffer.  The '%' at the beginning of my command means use the whole
buffer.

| But your technique for capturing the original line & using it for the 
| link description is very cool & will save me much effort for my updates.

Thanks.  Actually, I'm not 100% sure that vim supports backreferences
like that (the \1 in the replacement text).  I know that Python's and
Perl's regex engines do.  I think I've heard/read that vim does do
backreferences.

BTW,  I probably spent more time making my sample commands a little
shorter than you spent with your slightly simpler version.  Also, the
simpler the command is the more likely it is correct ;-).

-D



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