ASIC/FPGA Design and Verification Out Source Services

VIM running a shell command on a block

1. This pages show how to mark a block in vim and execute a shell command on it.


2. First you need to mark the block in your code.
   It is done by putting tags: mt on the top and mb on the bottom.


3. Second run the shell command:
   :'t,'b !sort
   :'t,'b !uniq
   


4. The example, which I selected, sorts the text and removes multiple entries by executing the sort followed uniq shell commands.


5. Another example, which may be very handy. At work I often need to number vectors in an increment form. So I easily create the following lines:
   signal sig_0 : std_logic;
   signal sig_0 : std_logic;
   signal sig_0 : std_logic;
   signal sig_0 : std_logic;
   signal sig_0 : std_logic;
   signal sig_0 : std_logic;
   signal sig_0 : std_logic;
   signal sig_0 : std_logic;
   
   begin
   Next I mark my area of work and fire the following perl script on that block:
   :'t,'b !perl vi_inc.pl
   signal sig_0 : std_logic;
   signal sig_1 : std_logic;
   signal sig_2 : std_logic;
   signal sig_3 : std_logic;
   signal sig_4 : std_logic;
   signal sig_5 : std_logic;
   signal sig_6 : std_logic;
   signal sig_7 : std_logic;
   
   begin
   The script can be easily improved do other functions as well. The increment script is shown below:
   
   1. #!/bin/perl
      
   2. 
      
   3. $cnt=0;
      
   4. while (<STDIN>) {
      
   5.   if($_ =~ /([^\d]*)([0-9]*)(.*)/) {
      
   6.     $a=$1; $b=$3;
      
   7.     $out=$a . $cnt . $b;
      
   8.     print("$out\n");
      
   9.     $cnt++;
      
   10.   }
       
   11. }#while
       
   
   Note that for simple renumbering, one can use cat command:
   :'a,'b !cat -n
   In this case the block of text, which is marked by tags a and b, is numbered between 1 to N.
   
   A complex example for scripting from within vim is shown at the following page.
   
   To remove all lines from a file except for ones, which start with the word FILE:
   :'a,'b !grep "^FILE"
   
   For simple increment / decrement operation a MACRO can be created using: ^a and ^x for increment / decrement.
   

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