Question

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gVim displays every file with an asterisk on the right (and bold)?

I’m using vim with nerdtree plugin for my rails projects and some of the files show up with a * appended to the filename. They are also a different color from the other files.

edit.html.erb*
index.html.erb
show.html.erb*

What does the * mean?

Answer 1

The key is the executable bit. For example, if you do this:

$touch no_exec_file exec_file
$chmod -v u+x exec_file
$ls -lF
total 0
-rwxr--r-- 1 reoo reoo 0 2012-09-19 19:14 exec_file*
-rw-r--r-- 1 reoo reoo 0 2012-09-19 19:14 no_exec_file

You can see the ‘*’ in the exec_file, now, if you open VIM, you can see the ‘*’ symbol again in the exec_file.

So, the NERDTree plugin shows the ‘*’ symbol for those files that can be execute by the user.