Hacking Blog

When vim is shutdowns abnormally it leaves a bunch of .swp files around.¹ Given the way I program (very iterative and test focused) those backups are rarely more current than the saved file. A great time saver to help with recovery is the vim DiffOrig command. After learning about it on StackOverflow, I put together the following bash script to find any swap files under the current directory, open each in vim, run DiffOrig and prompt to delete after you close vim.

#!/bin/bash

swap_files=`find . -name "*.swp"`

for s in $swap_files ; do
     orig_file=`echo $s | perl -pe 's!/\.([^/]*).swp$!/$1!' `
     echo "Editing $orig_file"
     sleep 1
     vim -r $orig_file -c "DiffOrig"
     echo -n "  Ok to delete swap file? [y/n] "
     read resp
     if [ "$resp" == "y" ] ; then
             echo "  Deleting $s"
             rm $s
     fi
done

I was planning on converting this to a vim function, but for now the extra step of exiting vim and answering a prompt works fine. Also, my vim already loads DiffOrig. ArchLinux includes it in /etc/vimrc. If your vim doesn't, I believe the following command will do it:

if !exists(":DiffOrig")
command DiffOrig vert new | set bt=nofile | r # | 0d_ | diffthis
               \ | wincmd p | diffthis
endif

BTW Iron Men, I realize this post isn't really Perl focused, but it is usually Perl files that I'm recovering!

Footnotes:

1. Which is almost never vim's fault. More likely an ssh connection was terminated or something along those lines.