Why does “locate filename | xargs vim” cause strange terminal behaviour?

Question

When I do "locate 50local.policy | xargs vim", I get the error "Vim: Warnung: Die Eingabe kommt nicht von einem Terminal" (translation: Vim: Warning: The input does not come from a terminal).

I can edit successfully with vim but after I close it my terminal behaves strangely (I can't type letters and when I hit enter the shell prompt simply gets repeated. When I do it with "xargs gedit" it does not create those problems.

I use Ubuntu 11.10 with Gnome 3 and Gnome-Terminal 3.0.1.

Answer 1

Vim expects to be connected to a real terminal and sends codes appropriate to that.

Reset the terminal with

reset

The easiest workaround:

locate 50local.policy | xargs gvim

Rationale gui vim doesn't require a terminal

Otherwise:

vim $(locate 50local.policy)

Rationale vim is started directly connected to the terminal (instead of as a child process under xargs which in turn runs in a subshell with stdin/stdout connected to pipes instead of a terminal). It is like saying

vim /usr/some/dir/50local.policy /usr/local/some/dir/50local.policy

Alternatively

You can dodge the issue by not starting vim with the arguments, but adding the arguments from vim! Vim is in fact a lot better at running shells than shells are at running vim.

Whilst in vim:

:args `locate 50local.policy`
:rewind

This sets the argument list to the files returned from the shell command between the ticks; :rewind then goes to the first file from that list. If you were editing multiple matches, try this:

:w|next

This sequence of commands (separated by |) writes the current buffer to file, then goes to the next file in the args list.

Answer 2

An other alternative is to execute xargs with the -o option. From the man page:

-o      Reopen stdin as /dev/tty in the child process before executing
        the command.  This is useful if you want xargs to run an interac-
        tive application.

Note, -o is a BSD extension to xargs.

A more portable means to achieve the same effect is:

xargs sh -c 'vim "$@" < /dev/tty' vim