Question

I am trying to open multiple files in vim from the command line with this command. For some reason I am getting an erro as you will see below.

 $ find . -name edit.html.erb  \
     | perl -pi -e 's/^..//'   \
     | perl -pi -e 's/\n$/ /'  \
     | vim

When I run it without “| vim” as in this command:

 $ find . -name edit.html.erb  \
     | perl -pi -e 's/^..//'   \
     | perl -pi -e 's/\n$/ /'

And get this output:

 addresses/edit.html.erb claims/edit.html.erb emails/edit.html.erb owners/edit.html.erb packages/edit.html.erb users/edit.html.erb vessels/edit.html.erb voyages/edit.html.erb %

I get an error that probably has something to do with that “%” mark at the end of the output.

Here is the output and error:

 Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal
 Vim: Error reading input, exiting...
 Vim: preserving files...
 Vim: Finished.

How can I fix this? Not sure which of the parts is causing the error since I’m a newb, but any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

You are passing the contents of the files as keyboard input. I presume what you want to do is launch vim with the files open. I don’t know vim, but that’s usually achieved by passing the file names as arguments.

In bash, one would use:

vim $( find . -name edit.html.erb | perl -pe's/^..//' | perl -pe's/\n$/ /' )

(Removed the nonsense use of -i.)

Actually, changing the newlines to spaces is useless, and so is removing the leading ./, so all you need is:

vim $( find . -name edit.html.erb )