Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!vsi1!altnet!uunet!ocsmd!bell_hop!bell
From: bell@bell_hop.uucp (John T. Bell)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Yet another vi question (summary)
Summary: Your vi is broke.
Keywords: vi, bugs, editors
Message-ID: <166@ocsmd.OCS.COM>
Date: 7 Oct 88 14:52:12 GMT
Expires: 13 Oct 88 23:00:00 GMT
References: <267@tijc02.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ocsmd.OCS.COM
Reply-To: bell@bell_hop.UUCP (John T. Bell)
Followup-To: John T. Bell
Organization: Online Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 20

Your vi seems to be broken. I have tried a number of the suggestions
on various vi's all with success. (Including Xenix 2.2, and DOS). 
However I could not get vi to return to the top of the file, after
including the template file. (ie; exec more than one ex command.)
However a simple shell script may solve your problem.
Something like this might work for you...

# rem if file exists and contains data then just edit it.
if test -s %1
	vi %1
else
# else give it the template and edit it.
	cat template >%1
	vi %1
fi

If you really wanted to be creative you could replace the reference
to vi with a reference to the editor variable, and let the user use
the editor of his/her choice. I am not aware of any problems with
forking to a shell script so this may be your best solution.