VIM, Run a command on multiple files

Question

I have a bunch of sass files and my designer used the wrong syntax. I wanted :margin-top 1px but he did margin-top: 1px

So I easily wrote a sub command:

:rubydo sub! /([\w-]+):/,':\1'

So that works and fixes all the colons and moves them in the place I want. I have about 50 sass files in a stylesheets directory. How can I run this command on all my files in one shot? I'm not really sure how to go about this in vim. Maybe something to do with grep? I couldn't tell ya.

score 33 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 20 '11 at 16:53

33

See this: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/editing.html#:argdo

I learned this command right now, but the help is clear.

Go for:

:args *.css
:argdo %s/\([[:alpha:]-]\+\):/:\1/ge | update

answered Aug 20 '11 at 16:53

Niloct

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+1 for `argdo`, `bufdo` is too general. You can also create an argument list local to the window with `:argl` if you don't want to change your global arg list. – Greg Sexton Aug 21 '11 at 10:37
2

I found this article on this subject to be very helpful: http://www.ibrahim-ahmed.com/2008/01/find-and-replace-in-multiple-files-in.html – webdesserts Mar 16 '12 at 19:32

score 9 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 19 '11 at 20:12

9

Here is an example

:bufdo %s/oldStuff/newStuff/ge | update

just change your regex to fit your needs

answered Aug 19 '11 at 20:12

Eric Fortis

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score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 19 '11 at 22:50

I think the best tool for this case is sed, the stream editor.

sed -i.old 's/:\([-a-z]*\)/\1:/' *.css

This will edit all your .css files leaving the original ones with the .old extensions.

The set of regular expressions used by sed is a bit different, and depending on your version more or less limited. The expression I used apparently works fine for your case — with the BSD tool.

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 19 '11 at 20:42

A couple of steps.

:vimgrep /^[^:]\w+/ %:p:h/*    " find all of the lines that don't start with a colon

This will put all of the matches into your quickfix list.

Then a macro to do what you want done.

qa
I:<esc>
f:x
:w|cn<enter>
q

Then test that macro a few times (with @a). Then another macro to run that macro over and over again...

qbq   " this clears out b before starting, very important!
qb@a@bq
@b    " watch in amazement.  :)

VIM, Run a command on multiple files

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