Troy D. Hanson <tdh@tkhanson.net>

Back to Scripts and Snippets.

Say you have vim running in one window, and wish to have make kicked off in a different window whenever you type backslash in vim. This is the sort of thing you can do with fifor. This utility does "something" every time a fifo becomes readable. You need to do a one-time setup to create the fifo:

In the window where you want the "something" to happen, start fifor with the command to be run:

Now it will wait. Anytime a line is written to /tmp/fifo, it will execute make. (You can use options to specify a different fifo file. Run fifor -h for usage). Note that if you want a sequence of commands to run when the fifo triggers, separate each command in the sequence with a quoted semicolon:

Whenever you want the commands to run, write a line (anything) to the fifo. You could just echo > /tmp/fifo to write an empty line to it. I automate this by mapping it to a keystroke in vim, using this line in ~/.vimrc:

Now whenever I hit backslash in vim, the make kicks off in the other window.