How to filter cscope output within Vim

Question

I am looking for a way to grep the output of cscope queries from Vim.

The following didn't work for me:

:cs f s symbol !grep pattern

It gave:

E259: no matches found for cscope query s symbol !grep pattern ...

P.S:
I know the redir method, I am looking for a simpler way to filter
output of ex command(s) through Unix commands.

Answer 1

You can use :redir to send message output to a register or file.

redir @c
cs f s symbol
redir END

Now you can put the c register into a file and filter it.

I don't get much output from cscope (it's all in the quickfix), but that will do what you're describing.

---

In general, you can filter shell commands (see :help :!cmd) with | (bar):

:!echo 0updateView | cscope -dl | grep global

But ex commands interpret bar as a command separator (so you can put multiple commands on one line):

:if &ft != 'help' | silent! cd %:p:h | endif

I don't think you can filter the output of ex commands aside from using redir. However, you could use Benoit's answer to filter the quickfix.