Newbie: Where's ed, vi, more (or less), man?

Larry Hall cygwin-lh@cygwin.com
Sun Aug 17 17:39:00 GMT 2003


Andy Civil wrote:

> Hi, a newbie here, my objective was to install Cygwin for a friend so 
> that she could use vi.
> 
> I've installed cygwin successfully, but various fundamental programs are 
> missing, notably vi (or even ed) more (or less) and man (despite the 
> fact that there are 801 files in /usr/man).
> 
> I've searched the packages in the setup program, but vi isn't listed 
> separately, and I installed everything anyway.
> 
> I've tried to search but the package search brings up anything with "vi" 
> in it, like "view" or "divide" or "david" :-) and the gmane newsgroup 
> search says "ignoring common word: vi".
> 
> It would help me if I could know basic information like, should I expect 
> to find vi with cygwin? I thought the main advantage of vi over other 
> editors was that it was found on absolutely EVERY unix system there was. 
> Should I be looking somewhere else for a package? And if so, how do I 
> find which package vi is in, when the word "vi" is impossible to search 
> for.


Yeah, I guess this one is a little tricky given that the package is vim
and vi is a symlink.  Typically, you can limit the search by requesting
the executable name with ".exe" appended but vi is a symlink here which
doesn't have that extension.  The other trick that is usually your best
bet is to append "usr/bin/" to the utility you're looking for like so:

<http://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-grep.cgi?grep=usr%2Fbin%2Fvi>

I think you should be able to figure it out the proper package from
this. ;-)


> I'm also concerned that I did something wrong, since even "less" doesn't 
> work. This is most odd, since there are scripts like "zless" which 
> clearly expect "less" to be a valid command.


Following the above:

<http://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-grep.cgi?grep=less.exe>


> As requested in the posting guidelines, here is my output from cygcheck:


We prefer if this information is _attached_ rather than inlined.
Attaching keeps this information from showing up as false positives
when searching for stuff in the email archives.


-- 
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
838 Washington Street                   (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746


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