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From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: How do I do this in VI?
Message-ID: <1991Apr15.233023.10882@convex.com>
Date: 15 Apr 91 23:30:23 GMT
References: <1991Apr15.223037.23316@massey.ac.nz>
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Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
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From the keyboard of R.Singh@massey.ac.nz (R. Singh):
:Couple of questions of commands under VI?

>1) Copy and paste every line in a file, for eg.

:%s/.*/&^M&/

>2) Insert a blank line after every line. For eg

:%s/$/^M/


You have to precede those control-M's with a control-V.

I don't think that vi is necessarily the right tool for this.  
I'd use sed or awk or perl.  Perl offers the advantage of 
in-place edits: 

For example, for the first case:

    perl -n -i.bak -e 'print "$_$_"' file1 file2 file3 ...

and for the second: 

    perl -n -i.bak -e 'print "$_\n"' file1 file2 file3 ...

The old version will be stored in file.bak in case of goofs.

--tom