vi moving lines and words

Question

I am taking a UNIX class, and unfortunately my teacher is not the greatest..So I am in need of your help!

I have a file named file1 with the text:

Roger Mancuso
Xavier Allen
Paul Bibbens

What our teacher wants us to do is with a single command first move the top line of the file to the bottom so it will look like:

Xavier Allen
Paul Bibbens
Roger Mancuso

And then using an ex command we have to take the first names, and move them after the last names, and separate them with a comma as such:

Allen, Xavier
Bibbens, Paul
Mancuso, Roger

Any help you guys could provide would be greatly appreciated, I tried going to my teachers office hours today to ask him about this and he basically told me to get lost, so now I have no idea what is going on..

Thank you so much!

Well should probably tag this as homework. but take a look at help :m for info on the move command for The first question) — Doon, May 06 '14 at 01:23
I never knew about :m before that worked perfectly, I have been trying to do the same thing with awk for the past couple hours @Doon — nom_nutella, May 06 '14 at 01:37

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 06 '14 at 05:04

2

:m $ - Move current line to bottom

:%s/\v(\w*) (\w*)/\2, \1/g - For second part

answered May 06 '14 at 05:04

Amit

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John C · Answer 2 · 2014-05-06T04:58:32.627

0

What about this for the second part?

:%s/\(.*\)\, \(.*\)/\2, \1/g

parentheses save what they match into variables which you can access as \1 \2 \3 etc.

edited May 06 '14 at 04:58

answered May 06 '14 at 04:52

John C

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vi moving lines and words

2 Answers2