I'm looking for a (bash) command to open a file (like in vim), search for a specific string, and search backwards from there, to find a second string, and output (only) that second string. For a file like this:

...
aaa x
...
aaa y
...       <-- any number of lines, but necessarily greater than 0
bbb
...

I've come up with this so far: vim -c "/bbb" -c "n" -c "?aaa" -c "n"

This doesn't work; vim reads:

Error detected while processing command line:
E163: There is only one file to edit
Press ENTER or type command to continue

I also need to save the string aaa y into a file/variable -- I can't figure out how.

TIA

CodePudding user response：

To address your main question… the commands executed in -c parameters are Ex commands, not normal mode commands. It just so happens that :/ and :? are valid Ex commands and work vaguely like their normal mode counterparts / and ?, but :n is shorthand for :help :next:

Edit [count] next file.

which is very different from normal mode :help n.

But why are you doing that in Vim to begin with? It doesn't seem appropriate.

CodePudding user response：

As others said, vim may not be the best tool for what you want to achieve.

You can try :

#!/bin/bash

expect <<EOF
spawn vim input-file
send ":1\r/bbb\rn\r?aaa\r:. 1,\$ d\r:1,.-1d\r:w! output-file\r"
sleep 1
EOF