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So I decided to to go through Damian Conway's (a well known Perl programmer) .vimrc setup as a way to get more familiar with vim and how it works. His first line is this:

autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.t setfiletype perl

But there is no line like this in the file:

autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.pl setfiletype perl

the .vimrc file also does not have a :filetype on command.

I'm curious to know: is there is some other method to get vim to automatically recognize what kind of file is getting worked on? Thanks.

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Vim recognises common file extensions by default, that's why you don't need to take care of .*pl.

The relevant code is in filetype.vim in Vim's program folder – go take a look.

Interestingly, the code for .pl is slightly more complicated than your line as it distinguishes between Prolog and Perl.

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  • Yeah, what was confusing me is I did not have filetype detection turned on and so the file was not getting recognized as *.pl. I learned that once I turned that on and reloaded the file, the file was then automatically recognized as a perl file. Thanks.
    – StevieD
    Feb 11, 2017 at 23:08

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