How to execute selected lines in bash and print the output in the next line?

Question

I know that with this command:

:yyp!!bash

I can execute current line and print the output in the next line (actually it copies the current line to the next line, executes it, and replaces it with the output), to get from this:

echo "Hello"

to this (after the command above):

echo "Hello"
Hello

I also know that I can use this command:

:w !bash

To execute the selected lines (plural) and show the output in the window below the editor.

What I want is to be able to select multiple lines, execute it in bash, and print the output in vim. How can I do that?

So desired behavior is to get from:

echo \
    -e "Hello\nWorld"
echo "Hi"

to:

echo \
    -e "Hello\nWorld"
echo "Hi"
Hello
World
Hi

Answer 1

When you have the lines selected you could just use the following:

yPgv:!bash

If you want to have that as a mapping you can do like that:

:xnoremap x yPgv:!bash<CR>

To be clear, do NOT use x here but insert your desired mapping. x would be a horrible idea, the cut function is pretty useful.

Breakdown:

y will copy the selected text

P paste before

gv reselect last visual selection

:!bash send it to bash

As you see, you had all the hard parts already there, which made it easy for me. Just a little lesson in vim trickery needed.

Explanation

The ! commands means filter all selected lines through an external program. In this case bash. see :h ! for information about that. So :! bash means send the lines to bash, and replace them with the output from bash.

You used :w !bash which is a write command (see :h :w). It does execute bash with the selected lines as the standard input. So vim just writes and does not directly read it back.

There is simple way I know of to get the results line by line. You could however call this command for every line. This would require some vimscript (see here for a starting point).

Answer 2

I would propose the following:

nnoremap _X  :put =system(getline('.'))<cr>
vnoremap _X  :<C-U>'>put =system(join(getline('''<','''>'),\"\n\").\"\n\")<cr>

The first mapping is to execute a single line. Just put the cursor in the line and hit _X. This takes the current line (getline(".")), executes it (system(...)) and puts the returned result below the current line.

The visual mode mapping works similar, but

• `getline('''<', '''>') fetches the list of selected lines
• join(..., "\n")."\n" joins the list into one string
• finally put puts the result below the last selected line, due to the leading `'>'