Can I run -c in batch mode (without opening the curses display)?

Question

I find myself performing a small shell loop (involving vim) to transform files into the correct line endings for my system. It looks as follows:

for i in *; do vim -c 'set ff=dos' -c 'wq' $i; done

It works. The problem is that the terminal flashes during the loop as vim opens and closes repeatedly. There should be a more elegant way to perform this.

---

Attempt 1 (-e -s)

I tried -e and -s from :h arguments

for i in *; do vim -e -s -c 'set ff=dos' -c 'wq' $i; done

but it is not doing what I believed it would do. set ff= is an ex command alright, and the command above works if I do not include -s. But if I leave -s out it opens and closes vim just like the original command.

---

Attempt 2 (:argdo)

I'm afraid of argdo because I never understood how it can perform changes to several buffers without writing them back to disk. And I just run into this exact issue in this attempt. I open all files with vim * and try:

:argdo set ff=unix

But after changing the current file I get:

E37: No write since last change (add ! to override)

---

I'm probably missing something simple in both attempts. I'm very keen on finding a good solution for attempt 1, since it is easier to automate.

What is the elegant way of performing such a multi-file conversion in vim?

Answer 1

You can use the following, it is nearly what you have done (using another example to see difference), you need to add the hidden option:

$ touch a b c
$ cat *
$ vi * +"set hidden" +"argdo r\!ls" +"xall"
$ cat *

a
b
c

a
b
c

a
b
c

set hidden tells vim you can switch buffer without saving them.

If you still want to use your loop, you can do the same:

for i in *; do vim +"r\!ls" +"x" $i; done

Answer 2

I already accepted an answer but I found a simpler way to perform this. Given a couple of files:

$ echo yay > a
$ echo yay > b
$ echo yay > c
$ file *
a: ASCII text
b: ASCII text
c: ASCII text

I can use the several :argdo commands separated by |, this way I do not need to rely on :set hidden:

$ vim -u NONE -c 'argdo set ff=dos | w' -c 'q' *
$ file *
a: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
b: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
c: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators

It works similar to :set hidden + :xall in terms of how the command appears on the screen but it writes the files one by one.