Executing Vim commands in a shell script

Question

I am writing a Bash script that runs a command-line program (Gromacs), saves the results, modifies the input files, and then loops through the process again.

I am trying to use Vim to modify the input text files, but I have not been able to find a way to execute internal Vim commands like :1234, w, x, dd, etc. from the .sh file after opening my input files in Vim ("vim conf.gro").

Is there a practical way to execute Vim commands from the shell script?

Answer 1

I think vim -w/W and vim -s is what you are looking for.

The "Vim operations/key sequence" you could also record with vim -w test.keys input.file. You could write the test.keys too. For example, save this in the file:

ggwxjddZZ

This will do:

Move to the first line,
move to the next word,
delete one character,
move to the next line,
delete the line, and
save and quit.

With this test.keys file, you could do:

vim -s test.keys myInput.file

Your "myInput.file" would be processed by the above operations, and saved. You could have that line in your shell script.

VimGolf is using the same way to save the user's solution.

Answer 2

You can script Vim via the -c flag.

vim  -c "set ff=dos" -c wq mine.mak

However that only gets you so far.

• From the commands you gave it looks like you are trying to run some normal commands. You will need to use :normal. e.g. :norm dd
• Writing all this on the command line is asking for trouble. I suggest you make a Vim file (e.g. commands.vim) and then :source via -S.
• You probably want to get good and conformable Vim's ex commands. Take a look at :h ex-cmd-index

So you will end up with something like this. With all your Vim commands inside of commands.vim.

vim -S commands.vim mine.mak

You may also want to look into using sed and/or awk for text processing.