Open file and scroll to bottom command line param?

Question

I'm new to vim.

I want to open vim from command line and have it scroll to the bottom of a file automatically.

The use case is opening logs.

Typically I open vim "vim log" and then scroll down using G. But I do this a lot. Does vim have a command line paramater to automatically scroll to the bottom like "vim -b log" ?

Answer 1

The following works for me:

vim log +$

The + bit tells vim to run a command after startup. The $ command moves to the last line in the file. Depending on your shell, you might need \ before the $ was to tell the shell to not treat the $ specially.

You can also put it before the file, which makes selecting from command history (e.g. up arrow in your shell) and modifying the filename easier, or making an alias:

vim +$ log

as an alias (using bash)

alias vimend="vim +$"

run like

prompt$ vimend /var/log/dmesg