Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Problem using :g/pattern/command

I've been looking at logs of telnet sessions to a target system with
a shell that uses more-like paging of command output. When the more
prompt appears and the user hits the space bar, the shell erases the
prompt with a series of backspaces and displays the next page of
output. Consequently, the log is full of lines like this:

[more 50%] (q,g,space,enter) ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HNext line of output

To make the log files easier to read, I wrote a function that
deletes all occurrences of a non-backspace character followed by a
backspace in the current line.

function! Col()
while 1
try
s/[^[:backspace:]][[:backspace:]]//g
catch /E486:/
break
catch /.*/
echo v:exception
break
endtry
endwhile
endfunction
command! Col call Col()

This works fine as long as I execute it manually for every line I
want to clean up. To clean up the whole file, I tried this:

:g/^\[more /Col

When executed on a real log file, the command "never" returns and my
CPU usage goes to 100%. Ctrl-C doesn't even work.

On a short test file with 9 lines of text, one of which begins
"[more " and contains 28 backspaces,

:g/^\[more /Col

doesn't terminate until I hit Cntl-C. At that point, the file has
been correctly modified but ":messages" shows

28 substitutions on 28 lines

What's going on and how do I fix this?

I'm running Vim 7.3.364 on a Fedora 11 system.

I know I could solve this particular problem with something like
this:

:%s/^.*[[:backspace:]]//

but I'm looking for a more general solution that also fixes lines
where the user has backspaced over a mistake.

Regards,
Gary

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