1VIS-OPEN(1)               BSD General Commands Manual              VIS-OPEN(1)
2

NAME

4     vis-open — Interactively select a file to open
5

SYNOPSIS

7     vis-open [-p prompt] [-f] [--] [files]
8
9     vis-open -h | --help
10

DESCRIPTION

12     vis-open takes a list of filenames and directories on the command-line
13     and displays them in a menu for the user to select one.  If the user
14     selects a directory (including ..), the directory contents are displayed
15     as a fresh menu.  Once the user has selected a filename, its absolute
16     path is printed to standard output.
17
18     vis-open uses vis-menu(1) as its user-interface, so see that page for
19     more details.
20
21     -p prompt
22           Display prompt before the list of items.  This is passed straight
23           through to vis-menu(1).
24
25     -f    Normally, if vis-open is provided with a single filename or direc‐
26           tory argument, it will automatically select it (printing the file‐
27           name to standard output, or presenting a new menu with the contents
28           of the directory).  If -f is provided, vis-open will always present
29           the arguments it's given, even if there's only one.
30
31     --    If this token is encountered before the first non-option argument,
32           all following arguments will be treated as menu-items, even if they
33           would otherwise be valid command-line options.
34
35           If encountered after the first non-option argument, or after a pre‐
36           vious instance of -- it is treated as a menu-item.
37
38     files
39           File and directory names to be presented to the user.  If a name
40           does not exist on the filesystem and the user selects it, it is
41           treated as a file.
42
43     -h | --help
44           If present, vis-open prints a usage summary and exits, ignoring any
45           other flag and arguments.
46

EXIT STATUS

48     The vis-open utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
49
50     In particular, like vis-menu(1), vis-open prints nothing and sets its
51     exit status to 1 if the user refused to select a file.
52

EXAMPLES

54           CHOICE=$(vis-open -p "Select a file to stat")
55           if [ $? -gt 0 ]; then
56                   echo "No selection was made, or an error occurred"
57           else
58                   stat "$CHOICE"
59           fi
60

SEE ALSO

62     vis(1), vis-menu(1)
63

BUGS

65     Because vis-open uses ls(1) to obtain the contents of a directory, weird
66     things might happen if you have control-characters in your filenames.
67
68Vis v0.5                       November 29, 2016                      Vis v0.5
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