How to call external program from vim with visual marked text as param?

Question

Call pattern: path-to-programm visual-marked-text filetype directory

Example: "C:\Programme\WinGrep\grep32.exe" search-pattern *.sql D:\MyProject\build

Answer 1

You select the text and then type:

:!<program>

For instance, to sort the lines, select them and type:

:!sort

Note that this will replace the marked text with the output of the external program