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vi editor command - delete a column.

I know vi relatively well.

dd - deletes a line
5 dd - deletes 5 lines.

How do you delete a singe character column? ...or 5 character columns, all the way to the bottom of the vi document?

SOLUTION

Gerwin Jansen

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

woolmilkporc

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Gerwin Jansen

vim - yes, the default 'vi' on most Linux systems.

@Rambi: if you do "vi --version", do you see something like:

VIM - Vi IMproved 7.3 (2010 Aug 15, compiled Feb 10 2013 03:57:45)
...

If that's so then you have vim (with an alias named vi) and you can use the visual mode.

Rambl

ASKER

which vi
/bin/vi

which vim
usr/bin/vim

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 629032 Jul 10 2012 vi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2828960 Jul 10 2012 vim

when I run vi, it doesn't allow me to do a ctrl-v (visual block)
when I run vim, it does

what's odd, is if I run:
/usr/bin/vim --version
/bin/vi --version

They seem to be the same version.

Perhaps vi is using the same config files the vim is using, but it still functions like the old vi. Maybe it's running "vim" in some kind of "vi" mode.

I just thought that was interesting.

Anyway, thanks for the help. ctrl-v in vim accomplished what I wanted.