The vi editor lets you deal with files in many ways. We can open multiple files, copy text from an opened file to save it to another file on disk ( export ), or insert a disk file into the editor at a specific location ( import ).
To insert a disk file into a location in the opened file, we use the :r filename command. The filename is the name of a file, with full path. If the path is not specified, vi searches for the file in the current directory. For example, if you have opened a file file1 in the editor and want to insert another file file2 after line number 8, you first move the cursor to line number 8. Then you issue the :r file2 command. All contents of file file2 are inserted into the editor after the current line. This is a handy way to combine multiple files.
You can export any number of lines so that they are saved as a new file on the disk. We use the w command for this purpose. As an example, if you have opened file1 in the editor and want to save lines 3 to 47 as file3 , you can use the command :3,47w file3 .
If you want to save the opened file as a new file (to make a backup), the same command can be used without line numbers . To save the current file as file4 , you use :w file4 .
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