Saturday, March 5
yo dawg
You can use backticks on the Vim command line to interpolate the output of a shell command into the command (just like in Bash). For example, I just did this to edit a script I use for taking screenshots:
:e `which grab-sel`
As you know, Bob, which(1) gives you the the absolute path to a command. In
this case, grab-sel is just a Bash script in
/home/brennen/bin/.
This comes in handy with pmwhich, a script I wrote to spit
out the absolute path of the version of a Perl module your user would see when
doing a use Module:
:e `pmwhich Text::Markdown::Discount`
Looking at it again for the first time in ages, I suppose that script could be
a little risky, since it does use the module in question, which could mean
all kinds of random code gets executed. I suppose this is a risk I’m willing
to take with a janky one-off utility, insofar as I’m probably already running
the code anyway by the time I need to use it. Nevertheless, beware that
it could get you owned by someone who already has the privileges to drop a
malicious Perl module somewhere on your system. (And probably, because
everything is hard, in other ways I’m not giving due consideration.)