can I do command substitutions in vimscript?

[ninjaaron]

In bash, I can do something like this:

foo=`cat bar`

... and then the variable $foo will be the content of the file "bar."

I want to use the cat command to assign a value in my vimrc. I'm sure this
is possible, but I can't figure it out.

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[Taylor Hedberg]

I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to accomplish, but if you want to
actually invoke cat to dump the contents of a file "bar" into a Vim
variable "foo", you can do:

let foo = system('cat bar')

where the string passed to system() can be any arbitrary shell command.

[Marc Weber]

Excerpts from ninjaaron's message of Thu Nov 10 23:24:13 +0100 2011:

> In bash, I can do something like this:
> foo=`cat bar`

let foo=system('cat bar')
or let foo = join(readfile('bar'),"\n") # lookup binary options

> I want to use the cat command to assign a value in my vimrc. I'm sure this
> is possible, but I can't figure it out.

Why do you want to use cat? ..

Marc Weber

[ninjaaron]

Thanks guys. I've been writing some scripts to change themes for my window
manager and my terminals together on the fly, and I made some vim
highlighting schemes to go along with them. With this command, I can echo
some text from my scripts to a file, and then have .vimrc read the file and
select the appropriate color scheme.

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