Open vim to a specific line with a variable

Question

I'm trying to do the following:

vim +$line $LEDGER

But instead of opening at the line number it's opening two files, one the number and the other the actual file I want to open.

It works for me (bash on Mac OS X). Are you sure that $line and $LEDGER are defined? $ echo $line $LEDGER. — benjifisher, Apr 7, 2014 at 3:03

Ingo Karkat · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-07 07:02:01Z

2

Probably, there is leading whitespace before the number in $line. There are several ways to fix this:

$ vim "+$line" "$LEDGER"

Note that it's always a good practice to quote variables, even if they currently don't contain whitespace or other problematic characters.

$ vim +${line# } "$LEDGER"

answered Apr 7, 2014 at 7:02

Ingo Karkat

23.1k2 gold badges49 silver badges60 bronze badges

I was doing wc -l $LEDGER and didn't realize it was adding the filename onto the output. I switch to wc -l $LEDGER | awk '{print $1}
– jpiasetz
Apr 7, 2014 at 13:38
Ah! You could also use cat $LEDGER | wc -l, or ${line% *}.
– Ingo Karkat
Apr 7, 2014 at 14:10

Add a comment |

1 Answer 1