Obscure Vi bug?

[David C. Miller]

In <11626 at ingr.com> lester at ingr.com (Lester Bartel) writes:

|While we are on the subject of vi macro bugs, I have one to add.
|I cannot seem to make the | (pipe) work in a macro.  What I want is
|a macro that will move my cursor to the 70th column (70|) so that I can
|split long lines onto shorter similar length lines easily.

In article <josef.649521753 at peun11> josef at nixpbe.UUCP (Moellers) writes:

|The problem is, that the bar (|) is a meta character "in the command
|line" (How do I express what I want to say?).
|You can write "map a b | map c d"
|Unfortunately, there is no way of escaping the bar, like escaping the
|brackets ([]) by prefixing a backslash.

There is a way to do this, but it is not at all intuitive.
What you want to write is "map a 70^V|".  The ^V is actually
an escaped ^V, so you need to type 2 ^V's before the '|'.

David
--

David C. Miller
ka2qhd!moria!dcm at tsdiag.ocpt.ccur.com / uunet!moria!dcm