[Linux-disciples] Editing files on a server

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 12:07:48PM -0500, Jason Smith wrote:
> Ok. Based on this and Steve's email it seems safe to say I should add  
> users to the file on the machine itself rather than my initial plan  
> for solving this problem. How would you edit this file though if you  
> were far away? Do you just run visudo remotely??

You could ssh to the remote host, then run 'sudo visudo', or
do it all in one step:

ssh -t remoteHost 'sudo visudo'

> I've given it a whirl but haven't remained sufficiently dedicated to  
> it to make it through the learning curve. Do you use vim for all your  
> work and general text editing?

I'm sure Adam does, and I certainly do. It has a
concision born out of an earlier era in which people did
remote work over extremely slow lines, so quite often its
succinctness is irritating. But there's apparently a more
literate way of programming it.

Even a few little vim commands make vim much much much more
efficient than any other text editor I've used -- e.g., to
select all the text from the current cursor position up to
the next repeated word (such as 'much more' earlier in this
paragraph), you can do

v/\W\(\w\+\)\W\1

which combines just three things you need to learn:

1) regular expressions (which are valuable everywhere in
   UNIX)
2) the visual-select command ('v'), and
3) finding a pattern in vim ('/').

Just learn a few atoms, and you're on your way.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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