Two vi questions.

[David I. Berg]

In article <614 at jvncf.UUCP>, saroff at jvncf.UUCP (Steve Saroff lac00001) writes:
> 2) Is there any quick and dirty way of inserting a character(s) say
> at the front of lines (e.g. quick commenting out of 20 lines of code)

Note that the ^ character is a symbolic variable whose value is the null
position in front of the first character of each line (just like $ is the
symbolic variable whose value is the null position at the end of each line).  
If you want to insert a # in front of every line in the file:

:%s/^/#/

If you want to comment out the next twenty lines from and including the
current line:

:.,+20s/^/#/

etc through all the variations on this theme.

-- 
David I. Berg (dberg at nosc.mil)
GENISYS Information Systems, Inc., 4250 Pacific Hwy #118, San Diego, CA 92110
MILNET: dberg at nosc.mil
UUCP:   {akgua decvax dcdwest ucbvax}!sdcsvax!noscvax!dberg