:grep and quickfix window

[Greg Klein]

I would like to use an external grep for my vim grep searches. So I have this in my _vimrc:

se grepprg=c:/cygwin/bin/grep.exe

 

Now I do

:grep XYZ *.c

 

Now I would like to look at the result of the grep in a quickfix window. But if I do

:cwindow

 

a quckfix window is not opened. If I instead do :copen, then I do see the grep result. But each line in the result is prepended with ‘||’ like this:

 

|| foo.c:line that contains XYZ

|| bar.c:and another line that contains XYX

 

I can’t seem to open the files by selecting them from the :copen window (put cursor on them and type <CR>). Are the ||’s the problem? Does it mess up grepformat?

 

What causes the ||’s to appear? If I run c:/cygwin/bin/grep.exe outside of vim I do not get them. If I do not set grepprg then the default for grepprg is findstr.exe. In that case, I do not get the ||’s. If I set grepprg to findstr.exe, then I do get the ||’s.

 

Greg

[Erik Falor]

The pipes separate filename from line number & column from the matched string.  Here's a picture:

Starter.cs|3| // Version $Id: Starter.cs,v 1.80.2.23 2008/09/04 19:31:51 rmehta Exp $

Starter.cs|49| /// Starter is the main launching class.

Starter.cs|51| sealed public class Starter

Starter.cs|66| private Starter()

To get my output to look like this, I have to run grep with the following args:

grepprg=grep -HnE

The -H forces grep to always print the filename containing the match, and -n tells grep to print the line number of the matching line.

Now, I have to tell vim how to parse the output generated by this invocation of grep:

grepformat=%f:%l:%m

 

Greg

--
Erik Falor
Registered Linux User #445632 http://counter.li.org

[Erik Falor]

I forgot to mention that because the output of the search you're running doesn't include a filename nor a line number, Vim is unable to jump your cursor to the location of the matched string.  As soon as you change your grepprg to output that info, and your grepformat to parse it, the quickfix list will be much more helpful.

In principle, this all works in the same way as Vim's compiler integration; it just parses the compiler's output looking for things that look like error messages with file locations it can jump to.

I should also mention where all of this stuff is documented:

:help grep - then scroll down ~62 lines to read about "External grep"

:help quickfix

:help errorformat

 

 

Greg

--
Erik Falor
Registered Linux User #445632 http://counter.li.org

[Gary Johnson]

The problem is that you forgot to include the -n argument as part of
grepprg. That is, you should set greprg like this:

:set grepprg=c:/cygwin/bin/grep.exe\ -n

See

:help grepprg

Regards,
Gary