I have a function (written below; source: TeX SX) that uses pipes in the shell which I'd like to use in vim command mode. It works as intended from the shell but returns an E34: No previous command error if entered in vim command mode. Full credit goes to jirislav in this post on TeX SX.
: | pdflatex -halt-on-error src.tex | grep '^!.*' -A200 --color=always
I'd very much like to have this shell functionality from the vim command line if anyone can help with that.
I tried the following from within vim command mode:
:! : | pdflatex -halt-on-error src.tex | grep '^!.*' -A200 --color=always
returns the E34 error. No pipes hides all compilation; however, it also doesn't output errors. Deleting 1 of 2 of the pipes also returns E34 errors for me.
I tried further troubleshooting to no success and here are some results of that. The help for :! says
a pipe '|' in {cmd} is passed to the shell, you cannot use it to append a vim command. See :bar
and :bar says (something that's referred to as escaping it out I think)
'|' can be used to separate commands, so you can give multiple commands in one line. If you want to use '|' in an argument, precede it with '\'.
I tried doing what :bar suggests, i.e.
:! : \| pdflatex -halt-on-error src.tex \| grep '^!.*' -A200 --color=always
The result is it hides everything, including compilation errors that I want to see. So I've come to the conclusion that I have no clue how to properly use shell pipes in vim command mode.
If you aren't a LaTeX user, all that the function is meant to do is the following. pdflatex compiles what's going on in vim into a pdf file. Enacting :! pdflatex % from vim's command mode outputs a whole slew of processing text and interrupts workflow; the grep in the function yanks out compilation errors, if they exist. The function, then, is meant to hide all output from pdflatex unless a compilation error occurs, in which case it outputs only the error and outputs it in red.
If anyone cared to explain the E34 error and why it doesn't work that would be appreciated, also.
Edit 1: This is now solved thanks to filbranden. Below there are a couple pictures attached of a minimal example should anyone come across this later.
vim file before input, output
Edit 2: Should you want to stick this in your .vimrc file, you'll need to escape out the pipe before grep, else the vimrc file defaults to thinking that pipe is a separator.
E34: No previous command
So the answer to your question was hiding in plain sight under :help E34, which redirects to the :! command.
(Vim pro-tip: whenever you get an error from Vim, ask for :help on the error code to get more context about it.)
The section on :! includes this passage:
Any ! in {cmd} is replaced with the previous external command. But not when there is a backslash before the '!', then that backslash is removed.
You did have a ! in your command, as part of the grep regular expression, ^!.*, so that was triggering the "history" behavior, trying to replace with the previously executed command. But since no command had executed at that point, the command failed with an error.
You can solve it by escaping the ! with a backslash, which Vim will remove before passing the command to the shell:
:! pdflatex -halt-on-error src.tex | grep '^\!.*' -A200 --color=always
But note that there are better ways to approach this problem! Let me cover some of them.
Using systemlist()
One great way to run external commands in Vim is to use the systemlist() function, which runs the command on a shell, captures its output, splits it into lines and returns a List with the resulting output lines.
So you could start with:
let latex_output = systemlist('pdflatex -halt-on-error src.tex')
And then use Vimscript commands to check for lines starting with ! to report to the user.
Note that, unlike with :!, the output of systemlist() is never displayed to the user (which means you don't switch back to seeing a terminal, possibly a blank one, and after the execution you don't have a "Hit enter prompt.) Which is great!
But that means you need to present that information to the user, when there are errors. A great way to do that is to use the quickfix window!
You can use the setqflist() function to set the contents of the quickfix window.
(For best results, you should set 'errorformat' appropriately, more on that later.)
Using vim-dispatch
If you don't like the part of running an external command (either through :! or systemlist()) that has it block Vim until the command execution is completed, then consider installing the vim-dispatch plug-in.
It can execute a command for you in background or in a separate terminal, so you're not blocked from editing. It also integrates with the :make command and the quickfix window.
Compiler configuration in vim-latex
Finally, the vim-latex plug-in (also known as latex-suite) has configurations to help you run pdflatex and report errors.
It includes a Vim :compiler configuration that will run pdflatex for you as a :make program. It also will set 'errorformat' to recognize the ! LaTeX Error string and recognize the line number of the errors, so you can jump to them directly from the quickfix list.
Note that vim-latex also has many other features to help you write LaTeX documents in Vim (besides managing the output generation through the compiler support.) You might want to check these other features as well.
(Since the plug-in has quite many features, I recommend reading the whole documentation to get you started on it.)
Also note that this plug-in is compatible with vim-dispatch (since vim-latex provides a compiler interface and vim-dispatch consumes it), so you can use both together if you like them both!
Related
There seems to be quite a lot of information on how to edit and execute a command using your editor using "edit-and-execute-command (C-x C-e)", but what I would like to achieve is take the current shell command, apply certain filtering (using a script) and then return it to prompt for further approval/manual changes before execution. Is this possible with bash?
Latest update based on my experience
The part 0"+y$dd in the following mapping is really something that you should carefully think about and tailor it to your taste/workflow/experience.
For instance, very frequently I've found myself ending up with multiple lines in the buffer, where I only want to execute the one the cursor is on; in this case I can use 0"+y$dd:%d<CR> instead of 0"+y$dd.
And this is just one of the possible scenarios.
Final answer for those who like vim
Set vim as your EDITOR/VISUAL, so that when editing a command line, you will use vim to edit it.
Put au BufEnter /tmp/bash-fc.* nn <Leader>d 0"+y$dd:wq<CR> in your ~/.vimrc file to map Leaderd (which you will rarely use when editing a command) to the action "delete the current line into the + register without the trailing EOL".
you can use either the + or the * register in the mapping above; the ways to paste into the terminal will likely differ; you need the +clipboard option for these registers to be available.
When finished editing a command in the vim editor, hit EscapeLeaderd.
Paste the clipboard into the terminal (this is terminal-dependent).
Original answer
I often need to do the same, and I do it as follows. (I normally use the set -o vi in bash, so points 1 and 2 in the following are different if you use set -o emacs, the default; based on your question it looks like points 1 and 2 are unified in Ctrl+x followed by Ctrl+e, which is harder to type, imho.)
hit Escape to be in normal mode,
hit v to enter the editor to edit the command,
edit the command as I like,
(This is where you ask the question.)
hit Escape0"+y$dd:wq,
Note: 0"+y$, not simply "+yy, as the latter would copy the newline too, and this would result in executing the command upon pasting it in the command line,
paste the clipboard on the command line
how to do this depends on the terminal you are using, I guess; I hit Ctrl+Alt+v in URxvt.
proceed to approval/manual edit.
Clearly this is just a workaround, consisting in copying the edited command into the clipboard before deleting the whole command, so that nothing gets executed upon exiting the editor; however it's the best I can get for myself.
Update
As my EDITOR (and VISUAL) is equal to vim, when I edit the command, I edit it in vim.
In this respect, I have noticed that the buffer is named /tmp/bash-fc.random, where random is a 6-characters alphanumeric random string.
This gives space to a lot of possiblities, if you use vim as your editor, as you can define some mapping in your .vimrc to execute the whole sequence Escape0"+y$dd:wq. For instance, one command that you'd rarely use when editing a command line is Leaderd; therefore you can put the following mapping in your .vimrc file
au BufEnter /tmp/bash-fc.* nn <Leader>d 0"+y$dd:wq<CR>
so that step 4 in the above recipe becomes
hit EscapeLeaderd
It's not possible to do that in Bash/readline but it's possible in zsh
using edit-command-line command:
darkstar% autoload edit-command-line; zle -N edit-command-line
darkstar% bindkey "^X^E" edit-command-line
Now press Control-x Control-e to open your editor, edit line, leave the editor - you will see the updated command line but it will not be executed automatically.
Now that I think about it, maybe a variation of what #kenorb suggested in a comment is the best workaround (as it seems no solution exists), if we want to stick to bash.
What you can do is prepend a # (the comment character in bash) to the command, rather than echo. Then when you exit the editor, the command will be ineffective, and you will only have to press arrow up (or k, if you use set -o vi), remove the # and confirming.
Note that this strategy adds just a few keystrokes, so it can be fairly efficient, depending on your typing level.
These pieces might get you closer:
a) replace the the normal binding for newline newline (ctrl-M)
bind -x '"\C-M":date"
b) grab the current line from the history using !#
replace date with whatever script you want.
c) edit manually
d) if necessary, somehow tie in !!:p which prints the new command to the command line but does not execute it, thus letting you manually edit it.
e) using ctrl-J submit edited command rather than a newline
or they might not ....
There is an option in bash to modify command from history without executing it. I'm not sure it it's possible to use script for this, doesn't seem to be likely. Although, you can make modifications using history modifiers.
Enable option histverify to prevent execution of modified command
Use chain of modifiers to change last command
Use "!!" to put your result to command line for final edit
Here is how it looks:
$ shopt -s histverify
$ ls *.sh
script1.sh script2.sh script3.sh script-return.sh
$ !!:s/*/script1/:p
ls script1.sh
$ !!:s/1/2/:p
ls script2.sh
$ !!
$ ls script2.sh
script2.sh
I'd like to point you to the Composure framework for Bash (I'm not affiliated with it): https://github.com/erichs/composure
It provides draft and revise functions that sound like they could help with what you're trying to do. Here's a (long) quote from the project's readme file:
Composure helps by letting you quickly draft simple shell functions,
breaking down your long pipe filters and complex commands into
readable and reusable chunks.
Draft first, ask questions later
Once you've crafted your gem of a command, don't throw it away! Use
draft () and give it a good name. This stores your last command as a
function you can reuse later. Think of it like a rough draft.
$ cat servers.txt
bashful: up
doc: down
up-arrow
$ cat servers.txt | grep down
doc: down
$ draft finddown
$ finddown | mail -s "down server(s)" admin#here.com
Revise, revise, revise!
Now that you've got a minimal shell function, you may want to make it
better through refactoring and revision. Use the revise () command
to revise your shell function in your favorite editor.
generalize functions with input parameters
add or remove functionality
add supporting metadata for documentation
$ revise finddown
finddown ()
{
about finds servers marked 'down' in text file
group admin
cat $1 | grep down
}
$ finddown servers.txt
doc: down
It does not seem possible with a keyboard shortcut, at least:
$ bind -P | grep -e command -e edit
complete-command can be found on "\e!".
edit-and-execute-command can be found on "\C-x\C-e".
emacs-editing-mode is not bound to any keys
possible-command-completions can be found on "\C-x!".
vi-editing-mode is not bound to any keys
This can be done in native bash using readline specifically READLINE_LINE and READLINE_POINT variables. I use this functionality all the time though not through vim, you would need to get the value of $selected from your vim command and if not empty it takes your original line + your input and replaces your original line with the combination without executing. output as a variable
_main() {
selected="$(__coms_select__ "$#")"
origonal_text=$READLINE_LINE READLINE_LINE="${READLINE_LINE:0:$READLINE_POINT}$selected${READLINE_LINE:$READLINE_POINT}"
READLINE_POINT=$(( READLINE_POINT + ${#selected} ))
}
bind -m emacs-standard -x '"\C-e": _main '
bind -m vi-command -x '"\C-e": _main '
bind -m vi-insert -x '"\C-e": _main '
Edit
Just remembered these two utilities that will let you do this as well.
Vipe allows you to run your editor in the middle of a unix pipeline and edit the data that is being piped between programs.
vp, up, vipe, Neomux (upgrade of nvim terminal) you can do some pretty neat throwing buffers between the terminal and split window.
and Athame (full vim on the command line)
https://github.com/ardagnir/athame
careful with that one though plugins work on the cli and it can get funky if you got tons of plugins
I have a bash script that executes a series of commands, some involving redirection. See cyrus-mark-ham-spam.
I want the script to have a test mode, where all the commands run are printed instead of executing them. As you can see, I have tried to do that by just putting "echo" on the front of each command in test mode.
Unfortunately this doesn't deal with redirection - any redirections are still done, so the program leaves lots of temp files littered about the place when run in test mode.
I have tried various ways to get round this, like quoting the whole command and passing it to a function that either prints it or runs it, but either the redirections work in test mode, or they don't work in run mode.
I thought this must have come up before, and wonder if there is a known solution which does not involve every command being repeated with an if TEST round the pair?
Please note, this is NOT a duplicate of show commands without executing them because neither that question, nor its answers, covers redirection (which is the essence of this question).
I see that it is not a duplicate but there is not general solution to this. You need to look at each command separately.
As long as the command doesn't use arguments enclosed in spaces, like
cmd -a -b -c > filename
, you can quote it:
echo 'cmd -a -b -c > filename'
But real life code is more complex, sure.
I'm trying to write a quick batch file. It will take the result of a command, put some extra text and quotes around it, and put that into a new file.The problem is that the result of the command I'm running includes a new line. Here's the command:
p4 changelists -m 1 -t //depot/...> %FILENAME%
The output of that p4 command has a newline at the end of it. The file I'm putting it into needs to have quotes surrounding the output of that command, but the fact that the command contains a newline in it means that the "closing quote" appears on a new line in the file, which doesn't work for what I'm doing.
I've tried writing the output of that command into a file and reading it back in, and also trying to run FINDSTR on a file containing the output, but I always seem to get back the stupid trailing whitespace. I've even tried inserting backspaces into the file, but that just put a backspace character into the file instead of actually executing a backspace...
Is there anything to be done about this?
I'm no perl wizard, but the following seems to work:
p4 changelists -m 1 -t //depot/...| perl -p -e "s/^/\042/;s/$/\042/"
Check out Strawberry Perl, which provides a Windows version of Perl.
I'm always looking at my Unix tools when solving problems like this, even under Windows. sed and gawk will also get you there, check out msysgit for a nice bundle of Unix tools that will run on Windows.
This question already has answers here:
How to trick an application into thinking its stdout is a terminal, not a pipe
(9 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
Various bash commands I use -- fancy diffs, build scripts, etc, produce lots of color output.
When I redirect this output to a file, and then cat or less the file later, the colorization is gone -- presumably b/c the act of redirecting the output stripped out the color codes that tell the terminal to change colors.
Is there a way to capture colorized output, including the colorization?
One way to capture colorized output is with the script command. Running script will start a bash session where all of the raw output is captured to a file (named typescript by default).
Redirecting doesn't strip colors, but many commands will detect when they are sending output to a terminal, and will not produce colors by default if not. For example, on Linux ls --color=auto (which is aliased to plain ls in a lot of places) will not produce color codes if outputting to a pipe or file, but ls --color will. Many other tools have similar override flags to get them to save colorized output to a file, but it's all specific to the individual tool.
Even once you have the color codes in a file, to see them you need to use a tool that leaves them intact. less has a -r flag to show file data in "raw" mode; this displays color codes. edit: Slightly newer versions also have a -R flag which is specifically aware of color codes and displays them properly, with better support for things like line wrapping/trimming than raw mode because less can tell which things are control codes and which are actually characters going to the screen.
Inspired by the other answers, I started using script. I had to use -c to get it working though. All other answers, including tee, different script examples did not work for me.
Context:
Ubuntu 16.04
running behavior tests with behave and starting shell command during the test with python's subprocess.check_call()
Solution:
script --flush --quiet --return /tmp/ansible-output.txt --command "my-ansible-command"
Explanation for the switches:
--flush was needed, because otherwise the output is not well live-observable, coming in big chunks
--quiet supresses the own output of the script tool
-c, --command directly provides the command to execute, piping from my command to script did not work for me (no colors)
--return to make script propagate the exit code of my command so I know if my command has failed
I found that using script to preserve colors when piping to less doesn't really work (less is all messed up and on exit, bash is all messed up) because less is interactive. script seems to really mess up input coming from stdin even after exiting.
So instead of running:
script -q /dev/null cargo build | less -R
I redirect /dev/null to it before piping to less:
script -q /dev/null cargo build < /dev/null | less -R
So now script doesn't mess with stdin and gets me exactly what I want. It's the equivalent of command | less but it preserves colors while also continuing to read new content appended to the file (other methods I tried wouldn't do that).
some programs remove colorization when they realize the output is not a TTY (i.e. when you redirect them into another program). You can tell some of those to use color forcefully, and tell the pager to turn on colorization, for example use less -R
This question over on superuser helped me when my other answer (involving tee) didn't work. It involves using unbuffer to make the command think it's running from a shell.
I installed it using sudo apt install expect tcl rather than sudo apt-get install expect-dev.
I needed to use this method when redirecting the output of apt, ironically.
I use tee: pipe the command's output to teefilename and it'll keep the colour. And if you don't want to see the output on the screen (which is what tee is for: showing and redirecting output at the same time) then just send the output of tee to /dev/null:
command| teefilename> /dev/null
I recently discovered 'comint-show-output' in emacs shell mode, which jumps to the first line of shell output, which I find incredibly handy when looking at shell output that exceeds a screen length. The advantages of this command over scrolling with 'page up' are A) you don't have to scan with your eyes for the first line of the output B) you only have to hit the key combo once (instead of 'page up' a number of times which probably is not known beforehand).
I thought about ending all my commands with '| more' but actually this is not what I want since most of the time, I want to retain all output in the terminal buffer, and I usually want to see the end of the shell output first.
I use OSX. Is there a terminal app (on os x) and shell (on remote linux) combination equivalent (so I can do something similar without using emacs all the time - I know, crazy talk)? I normally use bash, but would be fine with switching shells just for this feature.
The way I do this sort of thing is by sending my output to a file and then watching the file as it is written. You still get the results of the command dumped to terminal history in real time and can still inspect the output's actual contents further after the fact (or in another terminal, etc...)
command > output &
tail -f output
head output
You could always do something in bash like this:
alias foo='!! | more'
which would make foo run the previous command with more. I'm not sure of any way to do exactly what you are suggesting.
If you're expecting a lot of output and don't want to run your command twice, you can use tee(1) to fork the output:
my-command | tee /tmp/my-command.log | less
This will pipe the output to a paginator (less), while simultaneously logging the output to a file (in this case, a file named /tmp/my-command.log). If you need to review the output after you've quit from less, you can just cat the log file instead of re-running the command.