Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!nosc!cod!dberg
From: dberg@cod.NOSC.MIL (David I. Berg)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Two vi questions.
Keywords: vi
Message-ID: <1634@cod.NOSC.MIL>
Date: 9 Sep 89 21:33:47 GMT
References: <4237@ncar.ucar.edu> <3937@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <614@jvncf.UUCP>
Distribution: usa
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego
Lines: 23

In article <614@jvncf.UUCP>, saroff@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@nosc.mil)
GENISYS Information Systems, Inc., 4250 Pacific Hwy #118, San Diego, CA 92110
MILNET: dberg@nosc.mil
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